How do I know if PDF pages are color or black-and-white?
It is possible to use the Image Magick tool identify. If used on PDF pages it converts the page first to a raster image. If the page contained color can be tested using the -format "%[colorspace]" option, which for my PDF printed either Gray or RGB. IMHO identify (or what ever tool it uses in the background; Ghostscript?) does choose the colorspace depending on the presents of color.
An example is:
identify -format "%[colorspace]" $FILE.pdf[$PAGE]
where PAGE is the page starting from 0, not 1. If the page selection is not used all pages will be collapsed to one, which is not what you want.
I wrote the following BASH script which uses pdfinfo to get the number of pages and then loops over them. Outputting the pages which are in color. I also added a feature for double sided document where you might need a non-colored backside page as well.
Using the outputted space separated list the colored PDF pages can be extracted using pdftk:
pdftk $FILE cat $PAGELIST output color_${FILE}.pdf
#!/bin/bash
FILE=$1
PAGES=$(pdfinfo ${FILE} | grep 'Pages:' | sed 's/Pages:\s*//')
GRAYPAGES=""
COLORPAGES=""
DOUBLECOLORPAGES=""
echo "Pages: $PAGES"
N=1
while (test "$N" -le "$PAGES")
do
COLORSPACE=$( identify -format "%[colorspace]" "$FILE[$((N-1))]" )
echo "$N: $COLORSPACE"
if [[ $COLORSPACE == "Gray" ]]
then
GRAYPAGES="$GRAYPAGES $N"
else
COLORPAGES="$COLORPAGES $N"
# For double sided documents also list the page on the other side of the sheet:
if [[ $((N%2)) -eq 1 ]]
then
DOUBLECOLORPAGES="$DOUBLECOLORPAGES $N $((N+1))"
#N=$((N+1))
else
DOUBLECOLORPAGES="$DOUBLECOLORPAGES $((N-1)) $N"
fi
fi
N=$((N+1))
done
echo $DOUBLECOLORPAGES
echo $COLORPAGES
echo $GRAYPAGES
#pdftk $FILE cat $COLORPAGES output color_${FILE}.pdf
This is one of the most interesting questions I've seen! I agree with some of the other posts that rendering to a bitmap and then analyzing the bitmap will be the most reliable solution. For simple PDFs, here's a faster but less complete approach.
- Parse each PDF page
- Look for color directives (g, rg, k, sc, scn, etc)
- Look for embedded images, analyze for color
My solution below does #1 and half of #2. The other half of #2 would be to follow up with user-defined color, which involves looking up the /ColorSpace entries in the page and decoding them -- contact me offline if this is interesting to you, as it's very doable but not in 5 minutes.
First the main program:
use CAM::PDF;
my $infile = shift;
my $pdf = CAM::PDF->new($infile);
PAGE:
for my $p (1 .. $pdf->numPages) {
my $tree = $pdf->getPageContentTree($p);
if (!$tree) {
print "Failed to parse page $p\n";
next PAGE;
}
my $colors = $tree->traverse('My::Renderer::FindColors')->{colors};
my $uncertain = 0;
for my $color (@{$colors}) {
my ($name, @rest) = @{$color};
if ($name eq 'g') {
} elsif ($name eq 'rgb') {
my ($r, $g, $b) = @rest;
if ($r != $g || $r != $b) {
print "Page $p is color\n";
next PAGE;
}
} elsif ($name eq 'cmyk') {
my ($c, $m, $y, $k) = @rest;
if ($c != 0 || $m != 0 || $y != 0) {
print "Page $p is color\n";
next PAGE;
}
} else {
$uncertain = $name;
}
}
if ($uncertain) {
print "Page $p has user-defined color ($uncertain), needs more investigation\n";
} else {
print "Page $p is grayscale\n";
}
}
And then here's the helper renderer that handles color directives on each page:
package My::Renderer::FindColors;
sub new {
my $pkg = shift;
return bless { colors => [] }, $pkg;
}
sub clone {
my $self = shift;
my $pkg = ref $self;
return bless { colors => $self->{colors}, cs => $self->{cs}, CS => $self->{CS} }, $pkg;
}
sub rg {
my ($self, $r, $g, $b) = @_;
push @{$self->{colors}}, ['rgb', $r, $g, $b];
}
sub g {
my ($self, $gray) = @_;
push @{$self->{colors}}, ['rgb', $gray, $gray, $gray];
}
sub k {
my ($self, $c, $m, $y, $k) = @_;
push @{$self->{colors}}, ['cmyk', $c, $m, $y, $k];
}
sub cs {
my ($self, $name) = @_;
$self->{cs} = $name;
}
sub cs {
my ($self, $name) = @_;
$self->{CS} = $name;
}
sub _sc {
my ($self, $cs, @rest) = @_;
return if !$cs; # syntax error
if ($cs eq 'DeviceRGB') { $self->rg(@rest); }
elsif ($cs eq 'DeviceGray') { $self->g(@rest); }
elsif ($cs eq 'DeviceCMYK') { $self->k(@rest); }
else { push @{$self->{colors}}, [$cs, @rest]; }
}
sub sc {
my ($self, @rest) = @_;
$self->_sc($self->{cs}, @rest);
}
sub SC {
my ($self, @rest) = @_;
$self->_sc($self->{CS}, @rest);
}
sub scn { sc(@_); }
sub SCN { SC(@_); }
sub RG { rg(@_); }
sub G { g(@_); }
sub K { k(@_); }
Newer versions of Ghostscript (version 9.05 and later) include a "device" called inkcov. It calculates the ink coverage of each page (not for each image) in Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y) and Black (K) values, where 0.00000 means 0%, and 1.00000 means 100% (see Detecting all pages which contain color).
For example:
$ gs -q -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov file.pdf
0.11264 0.11605 0.11605 0.09364 CMYK OK
0.11260 0.11601 0.11601 0.09360 CMYK OK
If the CMY values are not 0 then the page is color.
To just output the pages that contain colors use this handy oneliner:
$ gs -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov file.pdf |tail -n +4 |sed '/^Page*/N;s/\n//'|sed -E '/Page [0-9]+ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 / d'