The document handler in Podcast Producer has been exposed to the command line in the form of a tool called document2images (located in the /usr/libexec/podcastproducer directory), which takes a pdf and converts it into a set of tiff files. In its most basic iteration the documents2images tool simply inputs a document and then outputs a couple of tiff files per page of that document. 15 pages will typically net you 30 tiffs and an xml output (not that you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again very easily).
When you use document2images you will need to specify the pdf using the –document option, the xml file to output using the –xml option and the directory to drop your images into using the –imagespath option. To use an example of this command, if I wanted to convert a pdf called /Users/cedge/Desktop/test.pdf into images in the /Users/cedge/Desktop/tiffs directory and drop the XML file into /Users/cedge/Desktop I would use the following command:
/usr/libexec/podcastproducer/document2images –document /Users/cedge/Desktop/test.pdf –xml /Users/cedge/Desktop/test.xml –imagespath /Users/cedge/Desktop/test
It’s worth note that the user invoking the command will need access to write to the directory that you’re dropping your images into as well as the directory that the xml file will be written to (and of course, to read the pdf).
