Determining the paths of images created as a result of Docsplit.extract_images

[hderms]

It would be nice if there was an option one could pass which would determine whether the images created were returned, or the path to the PDF that was created as an intermediary. I'm thinking something like :and_return => :images

or :and_return => :intermediate

With the default case (:and_return == nil) being the current behavior. I believe this wouldn't break backwards compatibility, and would increase the utility of this application from within Ruby.

[knowtheory]

Hey @hderms, could you explain your use case a little further?

[hderms]

I think perhaps I was being a little unclear. If one's primary goal is to split a PDF or PPT, or whatever into a bunch of sequential images via the Docsplit.extract_images method, then perhaps it would be useful to have that method return the paths of all the images extracted, rather than the paths of the PDFs from @pdfs in ImageExtractor. The PDF is merely an intermediate step, as far as I know, and returning the paths to the images extracted is probably more useful in most cases.

In my particular case, I have a Document model in rails, and I'd like it to have_many images. Programmatically receiving the paths to the images after extraction would be useful to me in setting up this relation.

[hderms]

I have a patch that implements this functionality like so:

Docsplit.extract_images('/home/rvibe/Downloads/BadPresentations.ppt', :size => '1000x', :format => [:png, :jpg], :and_return => :images)
=> [["/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_1.png", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_2.png", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_3.png", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_4.png", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_5.png", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_6.png", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_7.png"], ["/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_1.jpg", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_2.jpg", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_3.jpg", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_4.jpg", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_5.jpg", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_6.jpg", "/home/rvibe/Lib/docsplit/BadPresentations_7.jpg"]]

Without using the :and_return=> :images option, the default behavior is preserved:

Docsplit.extract_images('/home/rvibe/Downloads/BadPresentations.ppt', :size => '1000x', :format => [:png, :jpg])
=> ["/tmp/docsplit/BadPresentations.pdf"]