Java Lacks JBIG2 Image Support

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Wednesday, May 9. 2007

Java Lacks JBIG2 Image Support

I have been using the PDFBox library when working with PDF files, most commonly to extract the text for lucene indexing and generating thumbnails conveniently in Java. Recently I have started to see this error when generating thumbnails, which come out as properly sized plain white pages:

java.io.IOException: Unknown stream filter:COSName{JBIG2Decode}

Some of the latest PDFs, in this case from a new Xerox copier (which scans into PDF format), generates black and white images in PDFs using the JBIG2 format. Java has no built-in support for JBIG2 yet, and building a handler for this image type into the PDFBox library isn't an option for the development team at this time.

Options if you need JBIG2 support now include:

  1. Interface with the non-Java open source jbig2enc / jbig2dec libraries.

  2. Pre-process your PDFs (or other JBIG2 images) into a usable image format.

  3. Purchase one of the commercial PDF handling solutions which support JBIG2.

  4. Help the Java Advanced Imaging IO project build support for this format.

Fortunately option 2 works in my situation, as I only need to build thumbnails at this time, but your mileage may vary. Regardless, please vote for JBIG2 support in Java, as having comprehensive image format support in the JVM is the best possible solution.
Posted by Daniel E. Markle in Programming at 17:42 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Hi - how do you pre-process as in option 2? i'm interested in doing that. Any pointers would help!
Thanks
#1 Gurps on 2008-02-11 17:14 (Reply)
There are many possible solutions, but I would recommend Ghostscript (8.10 or newer for JBIG2 support). Pre-process the PDFs into an image:

gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -o myfile.jpg myfile.pdf

Then work with this jpeg as desired to create a thumbnail.
#1.1 Daniel E. Markle (Homepage) on 2008-02-17 12:33 (Reply)
Please see http://www.jpedal.org/jbig.php for an Open Souce, 100% pure Java JBIG2 Image Decoder available under a BSD license
#2 Anonymous on 2008-04-17 05:27 (Reply)

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