Hi, i am new to rust, and I would like to know if it would be a good choice for converting pdf to tif, like hundreds of thousands of files. And if so, should i use ghostscript as a subprocess, or import it as a c api? Or can I write the code myself, and if so, are there any good resources you could point me to?
Or something entirely else?
Cheers
If by converting you mean rasterizing every single page of the PDF to a tiff file then you should probably use gs or imagemagick directly using a script (shell, Python, etc) to automate the task. I love Rust but using it as a scripting language is still rough.
On the other hand, if you need to somehow process the files and, for example, extract some images and convert them to tiff Rust can be a nice choice, depending on how much logic and custom processing you need.
I understand this is not a yes or no answer, but it really depends on what you exactly need to do.
Thanks for the answer fogzot.
It is part of a longer conversion process with a lot of business logic behind it. I usually program in Go, but it seems like python is the best tool for the job, unfortunately. However, Ghostscript's C api is well integrated with python, so I'll probably go with Python
If you, on the other hand want to explore rasterizing PDF:s, do check out GitHub - LaurenzV/hayro: A PDF interpreter and renderer in pure Rust..
In my experience it was significantly faster and easier to use than e.g. GitHub - ajrcarey/pdfium-render: A high-level idiomatic Rust wrapper around Pdfium, the C++ PDF library used by the Google Chromium project..
I used it in GitHub - sermuns/pdf-to-whatever: export pages of a pdf to images, all using WASM in browser, no server.