Probably already documented: Ripping from PDFs? Help!

Hi All I'm having a lot of trouble ripping PDFs into Roll20. Image extractors seem to extract image 'parts' rather than what I actually want, and getting things like maps from my PDFs seems very difficult. I'd have thought this would be common procedure and well documented but it seems it isnt, or at least I cant find any references on how to do it effectively - all I can find is instructions on aligning maps to gridlines in the wiki. Please Help!

Personally, I use SnagIt to get most of my images out of the PDFs.

Simple and effective, but time consuming. Started ripping my PDFs like this though - thanks for the tip!

GIMP plus screenshots seem to work for me. Not sure what Snagit is, but i think i'mma look it up.

Recently I've used photoshop cs5 to great extent getting maps from pdfs. If you open the pdf inside of photoshop, it gives you the option of either extracting the actual pages from the pdf or just the images. In the pathfinder module "Carnival of Tears" what I found works the best is to extract the maps as images. The maps are stitched together in the pdf from a series of sub images. In the wizard that pops up I hold shift and select all the images that make up the particular map that I want to extract. I also leave all the settings at their default values. When I hit okay photoshop opens all the images up in their separate working areas. I copy the background layer, then delete the original background layer on each image. Next I use the magic wand to select and delete anything that's not a portion of the map part that I am working with. Once I've done that for every part I then make a new image of decent size, and start copying each of the map parts into that image as layers. Then I move them around so that they line up. The snap command is great but sometimes you have to turn it off to fine tune a connection. I try to line up everything pixel perfect. Once that's done I then flatten and merge all visible layers and press ctrl+a to select everything then copy it and make a new image. This new image will be the size of just your full map. Photoshop will not include any extra transparency. So if your actual map is only 800x900 and your "stitching" image is 2000x9000 and you do the select all and copy, the new image will only be around 800x900. Best part is, one now your map should be free of GM markers without you having to use the clone tool to deal with it. The second part is that if you use the "Save for Web" option in the file menu then not only is your resultant map super tiny in kilobytes compared to it's dimensions. But also you can scale it up or down and it still stays really crisp. Good luck!

Steve S. said: GIMP plus screenshots seem to work for me. Not sure what Snagit is, but i think i'mma look it up. I've found this to be sufficent as well, I think it depends on how "HD" your moniter is compared to the rest of the group though.

Windows 7 has a built in "Snipping Tool" that works pretty much like SnagIt.

I have the full version of Acrobat. I extract pages like this. On the menu bar go Document>Pages>Extract. You can select the single page that you want. i.e. a page with a map on it. With the single extracted page, again on the menu bar, go to Advanced>Export All Images. This will export your page automatically as a jpg file. You can then crop out any map or pics or articles with Gimp or Photoshop (or whatever you use). Then the jpg files import directly into Roll20. You can scan you favorite module and import maps in this way. or NPC data or whatever.

I use PDF-XChange Viewer. It's free, and it has an Export Function too. The advantage over simpy screenshoting is the resolution I can get. Most PDFs save the images in a higher resolution internally so you can zoom in and don't get blurred right away. When I screenshot it, I get a 1920x1080 image, crop it and end up with a 1800x900 or so maybe. Now depending on how the map is made, to get it to align in Roll20 I might have to blow the image up by factor 2 or 3, which results in massive blurryness when it ends up in Roll20, even at 100% zoom. With PDF XChange I can set the export DPI to 600 for example, and get an image that's about 5000x3000 large. Sure it's a big bigger, but is a MB really an issue these days? I then crop it and when I upload it into Roll20 I will not have to resize it as badly. The sharpness differnece is very noticeable. Of course, if the PDF you use saves it's images internally only with 200 DPI, then you won't notice a difference to simply extracting it with 300 or 200 DPI, as all it does is atificially resize it. I noticed that 600 seems to be the upper limit where you notice a difference at least with Paizo PDFs that I use. 1200 DPI results in 4 times bigger images but the image quality doesn't go up.