: Add the bin64 or bin32 folder to your Windows System PATH to run commands from any terminal window.
Press the , type "Environment Variables," and select Edit the system environment variables .
Do not run the tools from the zip folder. Extract the contents to a permanent location.
: The win-4.04 designation indicates that the tools are ready to run on Windows without the need for manual compilation from source code. Use Cases
: The tool introduced a drag-and-drop feature for reordering tabs, allowing users to manage multiple documents more intuitively. Deep Metadata Access xpdf-tools-win-4.04
is a robust, lightweight collection of command-line utilities designed for specialized PDF manipulation, such as text extraction and format conversion. Released in April 2022, version 4.04 primarily serves as a bug-fix update that addresses security vulnerabilities and introduces quality-of-life improvements for power users. Core Utilities & Capabilities
Unlike bloated graphic-heavy PDF software, this 11-megabyte toolkit operates entirely through the Windows Command Prompt or PowerShell, offering unparalleled speed and low resource consumption. It is widely used by automated web backends, content management plugins like SearchWP , database extractors, and desktop developers who need to integrate high-speed document processing without launching heavy GUI applications. Core Utilities in the 4.04 Windows Toolkit
This command extracts all images as PNG files, naming them like my_images-001.png , my_images-002.png , etc. Without -png , the default PPM format is used.
To use these tools from any Command Prompt or PowerShell window: : Add the bin64 or bin32 folder to
Version 4.04 of the Xpdf tools is a maintenance release for the popular PDF command-line utilities suite. This package provides a set of robust tools for manipulating Portable Document Format (PDF) files. It is widely used in automated workflows, server-side processing, and by developers requiring PDF capabilities without the overhead of a GUI application.
: After downloading the xpdf-tools-win-4.04.zip file, right-click it and select "Extract All..." . Choose a location for the extracted folder. A good practice is to place it in a directory like C:\Program Files\Xpdf or C:\Tools\xpdf-tools-win-4.04 .
Here are some common use cases you can try right away:
pdfimages -j -png -tiff report.pdf images/prefix Extract the contents to a permanent location
of the open-source Xpdf command-line toolkit. Developed by Derek Noonburg of Glyph & Cog LLC, version 4.04 provides lightweight, dependency-free, and high-performance terminal utilities designed to parse, extract data from, and convert Portable Document Format (PDF) files on Windows 7 and newer operating systems. What is Contained inside xpdf-tools-win-4.04 ?
Invoke-WebRequest https://dl.xpdfreader.com/xpdf-tools-win-4.04.zip -OutFile $env:userprofile\Downloads\xpdf-tools-win-4.04.zip Expand-Archive -Path $env:userprofile\Downloads\xpdf-tools-win-4.04.zip -DestinationPath C:\
To list all attachments:
Understanding what changed in version 4.04 helps in deciding whether to upgrade. The official xpdf-4.04 release was announced on April 18, 2022, and is characterized as , though it includes several notable new features.
This step is only required if you plan to use non-embedded fonts (like Chinese or Japanese character sets) or want to fine-tune PDF rendering.
Pre-processing PDFs for search indexing, text mining, or reading documents on devices that do not support PDFs. 2. pdftoppm.exe and pdftoppm.exe