I am trying to run python subprocess.run function to execute following command:
pdftoppm -jpeg -f 1 -scale-to 200 data/andromeda.pdf and-page
pdftoppm - is part of poppler utility and it generates images from pdf files.
File data/andromeda.pdf exists. Folder data is on same level with python script and/or where I run command from. Command basically will generate a jpeg file, from page 1 (-f 1) 200px wide (-scale-to) from given file of and-page-1.jpeg format (so called ppmtroot).
Long story short: from command line it works as expected i.e. if I call the above command either from zsh or bash shell, manually - it generates thumbnail as expected. However if I run it from python subprocess module - it fails it returns 99 error code!
Following is python code (file name is sc_02_thumbnails.py):
import subprocess
import sys
def main(filename, ppmroot):
cmd = [
'pdftoppm',
'-f 1',
'-scale-to 200',
'-jpeg',
filename,
ppmroot
]
result = subprocess.run(
cmd,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
stderr=subprocess.PIPE
)
if result.returncode:
print("Failed to generate thumbnail. Return code: {}. stderr: {}".format(
result.returncode,
result.stderr
))
print("Used cmd: {}".format(' '.join(cmd)))
sys.exit(1)
else:
print("Success!")
if __name__ == "__main__":
if len(sys.argv) > 2:
filename = sys.argv[1]
ppmroot = sys.argv[2]
else:
print("Usage: {} <pdffile> <ppmroot>".format(sys.argv[0]))
sys.exit(1)
main(filename, ppmroot)
And here is repo which includes data/andromeda.pdf file as well. I call my script with as (from zsh):
$ chmod +x ./sc_02_thumbnauils.py
$ ./sc_02_thumbnails.py data/andromeda.pdf and-page
and ... thumbnail generating fails! I have tried executing python script from both, from zsh and bash shells :( What I am doing wrong?
The quoting is wrong, you should have '-f', '1',
etc