pdf_count_color_pages

Short Python script to count the number of color pages in a PDF file

Setup

Set up python environment, e.g. with anaconda:

conda env create --prefix ./env -f environment.yml

Then activate it:

conda activate ./env

Usage

Simply pass the path to the PDF file that shall be analyzed as command line argument, like

python count_color_pages.py document.pdf

for the file document.pdf.

How it works

For each page of the PDF file, an image (PIL) of this page is created using the pdf2image package. Using the PIL method getcolors, all existing colors (or gray levels) within the image are determined. Colors returned by this method are represented as RGB tuples. A color is interpreted as a gray level if all three RGB values are almost equal. If this condition is not fulfilled for any of the returned colors, the page is considered as a color page.