Extracting background images from a PDF file?

Solution 1:

You can download the XPDF library from http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html for Linux and Windows. Then run pdfimages -j input.pdf output and you should get output-000.jpg, output-001.jpg, etc. Also, check out http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/pdfimages1.html for more usage options.

Solution 2:

Ok, after messing around with this for 5 minutes, my analysis is that PDF is even weirder than I originally thought, and that's saying something.

Not sure what your budget is, but with Acrobat Pro Extended 9, you can use:

A. Tools, Advanced Editing, Touchup Text Tool

-Select All
-Right click, Properties
-Text tab
-Select a standard font (e.g. Arial), close
-Hit Delete

B. Tools, Advanced editing, Touchup Object Tool

-Select the object (you can get most, but not all, of them (e.g. student computers icons can't be selected), then delete

Here's what Page 1 looked like after a quick cleanup: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7434256/p1test.pdf