How do I find the orientation of a PDF using PHP or a Linux script?

Question

I need to scan an uploaded PDF to determine if the pages within are all portrait or if there are any landscape pages. Is there someway I can use PHP or a linux command to scan the PDF for these pages?

Accepted Answer

(Updated answer -- scroll down...)

You can use either `pdfinfo` (part of either the poppler-utils or the xpdf-tools) or `identify` (part of the ImageMagick toolkit).

identify:

```
identify -format "%f  Page %s:   Width: %W -- Height: %H
" T-VD7.PDF
```

Example output:

```
T-VD7.PDF  Page 0:  Width: 595 -- Height: 842
T-VD7.PDF  Page 1:  Width: 595 -- Height: 842
T-VD7.PDF  Page 2:  Width: 1191 -- Height: 842
[...]
T-VD7.PDF  Page 11:  Width: 595 -- Height: 421
T-VD7.PDF  Page 12:  Width: 595 -- Height: 842
```

Or a bit simpler:

```
identify -format "%s: %Wx%H
" T-VD7.PDF
```

gives:

```
0:  595x842
1:  595x842
2:  1191x842
[...]
11:  595x421
12:  595x842
```

Note, how `identify` uses a zero-based page counting mechanism!

Pages are 'landscape' if their width is bigger than their height. They are neither-nor, if both are equal.

The advantage is that `identify` lets you tweak the output format quite easily and very extensively.

pdfinfo:

```
pdfinfo input.pdf | grep "Page.*size:"
```

Example output:

```
Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
```

`pdfinfo` is definitely faster and also more precise than `identify`, if it comes to multi-page PDFs. (The 13-page PDF I tested this with took `identify` to 31 seconds to process, whereas `pdfinfo` needed less than half a second....)

Be warned: by default `pdfinfo` does report the size for the first page only. To get sizes for all pages (as you may know, there are PDFs which use mixed page sizes as well as mixed orientations), you have to modify the command:

```
pdfinfo -f 3 -l 13 input.pdf | grep "Page.*size:"
```

Output now:

```
Page    1 size: 595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
Page    2 size: 595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
Page    3 size: 1191 x 842 pts (A3)
[....]
Page   12 size: 595 x 421 pts (A5)
Page   13 size: 595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
```

This will print the sizes of page 3 (f irst to report) through page 13 (l ast to report).

Scripting it:

```
  pdfinfo \
    -f 1 \
    -l 1000 \
     Vergleich-VD7.PDF \
| grep "Page.* size:" \
| \
| while read Page _pageno size _width x _height rest; do 
  [ "$(echo "${_width} / 1"|bc)" -gt "$(echo "${_height} / 1"|bc)" ] \
     && echo "Page $_pageno is landscape..." \
    || echo "Page $_pageno is portrait..."  ; \
 done
```

(the `bc`-trick is required because the `-gt` comparison works for the shell only with integers. Dividing by `1` with `bc` will take round the possible real values to integers...)

Result:

```
Page 1 is portrait...
Page 2 is portrait...
Page 3 is landscape...
[...]
Page 12 is landscape...
Page 13 is portrait...
```

Update: Using the 'right' `pdfinfo` to discover page rotations...

My initial answer tooted the horn of `pdfinfo`. Serenade X says in a comment that his/her problem is to discover rotated pages.

Ok now, here is some additional info which is not yet known widely and therefor has not yet been really absorbed by all `pdfinfo` users...

As I mentioned, there are two different `pdfinfo` utilities around:

- the one which comes as part of the `xpdf-utils` package (on some platform also named `xpdf-tools`).

- the one which comes as part of the `poppler-utils` package (on some platforms also named `poppler-tools`, and sometimes it is not separated out as a packages but is part of the main `poppler` package).

Poppler's `pdfinfo` output

So here is a sample output from Poppler's `pdfinfo` command. The tested file is a 2-page PDF where the first page is in portrait A4 and the second page is in landscape A4 format:

```
kp@mbp:~$  pdfinfo -f 1 -l 2 a4portrait+landscape.pdf 
Producer:       GPL Ghostscript 9.05
CreationDate:   Thu Jul 26 14:23:31 2012
ModDate:        Thu Jul 26 14:23:31 2012
Tagged:         no
Form:           none
Pages:          2
Encrypted:      no
Page    1 size: 595 x 842 pts (A4)
Page    1 rot:  0
Page    2 size: 842 x 595 pts (A4)
Page    2 rot:  0
File size:      3100 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4
```

Do you see the lines saying `Page 1 rot: 0` and `Page 2 rot: 0`?

Do you notice the lines saying `Page 1 size: 595 x 842 pts (A4)` and `Page 2 size: 842 x 595 pts (A4)` and the differences between the two?

XPDF's `pdfinfo` output

Now let's compare this to the output of XPDF's `pdfinfo`:

```
kp@mbp:~$  xpdf-pdfinfo -f 1 -l 2 a4portrait+landscape.pdf 
Producer:       GPL Ghostscript 9.05
CreationDate:   Thu Jul 26 14:23:31 2012
ModDate:        Thu Jul 26 14:23:31 2012
Tagged:         no
Pages:          2
Encrypted:      no
Page    1 size: 595 x 842 pts (A4)
Page    2 size: 842 x 595 pts (A4)
File size:      3100 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4
```

You may notice one more difference, if you look closely enough. I won't point my finger to it, and will keep my mouth shut for now... :-)

Poppler's `pdfinfo` correctly reports rotation of page 2

Next, I rotate the second page of the file by 90 degrees using `pdftk` (I don't have Adobe Acrobat around):

```
pdftk \
  a4portrait+landscape.pdf \
  cat 1 2E \
  output a4portrait+landscape---…

How do I find the orientation of a PDF using PHP or a Linux script?

Solution

Problem