Count BW / color pages in PDF

Question

I have a 100 page PDF document that I need to print. My print shop needs to be told which pages contain color. I don't want to scan manually. Is there a program that detects pages with color and can ouput the page number?

Answer 1

On Linux (and probably mac/other Unix), the following very short BASH script seems to do the trick:

 #!/bin/bash
 file="$1"
 for page in $(identify -density 12 -format '%p ' "$file") ; do
     if convert "$file[$((page-1))]" -colorspace RGB -unique-colors txt:- | sed -e 1d | egrep -q -v ': \(\s*([0-9]*),\s*\1,\s*\1' ; then
         echo $page
     fi
 done

Name the script something like coloredpages.sh, and make it executable with chmod +x coloredpages.sh and then run ./coloredpages.sh "pdfname.pdf" and it should return a list of page numbers.

This requires ImageMagick and probably Ghostscript to be installed. And it's not the speediest thing in the world.

Sorry, I have no clue how to adapt this for Windows (without Cygwin or similar, anyway).

Answer 2

We have a tool Rapid PDF Count that can count Color and BW/Gray pages in pdf's

see: http://www.traction-software.co.uk/rapidpdfcount/index.html

Answer 3

Having the same task as the OP and working in Windows, I've found the following solution to work quickly and nicely: Spool File Page Counter SDK is non-free but the evaluation version still does the job. Download the zip file from the above link, unzip it and run bin/C#_ParsingTest yourfile.pdf. You'll see something like

Page   1 is [   BW]
Page   2 is [Color]
...
Page 143 is [Color]
============
Statistics: bwPageCount=99, colorPageCount=44

The Rapid PDF Count mentioned in another answer here requires installation (which for my one-time job---dissertation printing) is a disadvantage. However it also does the job and provides a GUI. After installing it, run it, drag-and-drop the PDF file into it, check Color Pages Counting in Setup/Options, then click the Page count files in list button.

Interestingly, the results for my thesis differ by 1 page (99/44 vs. 100/43). I believe, this is because some figure (I made all with Inkscape) is actually black-and-white but is described as colour in metadata. I am not sure. What I didn't find in Rapid PDF Count is a list of all colour/B&W pages, so I cannot tell the exact source of this discrepancy.