Comment by kevin_thibedeau

8 hours ago

pdftoppm and Ghostscript (invoked via Imagemagick) re-rasterize full pages to generate their output. That's why it was slow. Even worse with a Q16 build of Imagemagick. Better to extract the scanned page images directly with pdfimages or mutool.

Followup: pdfimages is 13x faster than pdftoppm