Adobe Acrobat Pro Image Export not Capturing Full Image

[lydiab999]

I've been trying to export just the images in a pdf, but when I got to Export > PNG (and select Images) I get a problem where Adobe chops 50% of my images in half. In Edit mode, I can see that the image is cut into 2 selection boxes, right down the middle. Is there a way to fix this? I'm trying to export hundreds of images from hundreds of pdfs, and really don't want to do it manually.

[Test Screen Name]

If Acrobat exports two images, it's because the PDF already has two images. So it isn't a decision made during Export, it already happened.

[lydiab999]

But why would the above image be 2 images? It's clearly one graph. Is there any way to merge this into 1 easily?

[Test Screen Name]

That was a decision made by the software that created the PDF for some reason. You'd have to find the programmer who made the decision. Essentially, they don't put images in there for your convenience or mine, but to look right on screen and on print.

[try67]

Sometimes they even do it on purpose, so that extracting the contents of the file is more difficult...

[lydiab999]

Terrible Adobe design then... Is there any way around it that you know of? Is my best bet to create a script that somehow merges images that are side by side? Or is there any program that handles image export better?

[try67]

Why is it "terrible design"? Should they have forced the creators of the files to only insert one image per page? The author of the form is free to design it whatever way they wish to. Anything else would be limiting their abilities to achieve what they want to.

And no, there's no script that can merge the images. Your only option is to export them and then re-assemble them in another application, like Photoshop, or to take a screenshot of both images on the PDF page and save it as a new image.

[lydiab999]

Lol, how is it not a terrible design for Adobe to import one whole image, and then split it in 2, making the user then have to jump through hoops like using Photoshop and/or screenshots to get it back into its original form? The image above should have rendered as 1 per page. Adobe is what split it into 2 images. Seeing as I'm not going to be screenshotting thousands of these images, I'll have to develop a script. Not sure you're understanding from your comment, "should they have force the creators of the files to only insert one image per page"... Of course that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying Adobe shouldn't split an existing image in half.

[try67]

Because it's not "one whole image". It's two images, one next to each other. Adobe is not splitting anything. It's just giving you what the author of the file created.

[Bernd Alheit]

How did you create the PDF files?

[lydiab999]

The pdfs are downloaded from an internal company website. Some of the pdfs were originally created back in the 70's, and modified every couple years through today. Perhaps it's an issue with the pdf being so old. I can't see why the author of the file wouldn't have split only some of the images perfectly in half and arranged them side by side. It's odd... been puzzling me for a week.

[Dov Isaacs]

lydiab999  wrote

The pdfs are downloaded from an internal company website. Some of the pdfs were originally created back in the 70's, and modified every couple years through today. Perhaps it's an issue with the pdf being so old. I can't see why the author of the file wouldn't have split only some of the images perfectly in half and arranged them side by side. It's odd... been puzzling me for a week.

That is literally impossible! PDF as a document format didn't exist until the 1993 when Acrobat 1.0 was released by Adobe! 

          - Dov

[lydiab999]

Sorry, the original documents were created in the 70's. I guess they were scanned to pdf's in the 90's then.

[Dov Isaacs]

lydiab999  wrote

Sorry, the original documents were created in the 70's. I guess they were scanned to pdf's in the 90's then.

And that may be the source of the problem.

There are at least two possibilities here:

(1)     When originally scanned, the documents were too big to be scanned as a single image. Two scans were merged together onto a single PDF page.

(2)     Some scanners that natively create PDF try to be “intelligent” and divide the page into multiple zones using different color spaces, compression schemes, and/or quality settings to minimize the resultant PDF file size.

          - Dov

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

In addition to what Dov said, Acrobat itself, actually split up large images into bands of smaller ones at some point in time (my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I would guess back in Acrobat 6 or 7).

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, you can stitch these images back together using the Preflight tool:

After you start the preflight tool, make sure that the "single fixups" category is selected. To make finding the fixup easier, just type "detect" into the search field, and you will see the "Detect and merge image fragments" fixup. That should merge your two half images back into one complete image.

[Dov Isaacs]

Actually, Acrobat itself didn't split up images, but if you printed to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance (or its predecessor) with images with any transparency, the application/driver combination often split up the image due to flattening to eliminate the transparency (PostScript doesn't support live transparency).

          - Dov