Converting a PDF to PNG

Adam_63104 0
Viewed 123062

I'm trying to convert a PDF to a PNG image (at least the cover of one). I'm successfully extracting the first page of the PDF with pdftk. I'm using imagemagick to do the conversion:

convert cover.pdf cover.png

This works, but unfortunately the cover.png comes through incorrectly rendered (some of the alpha object in the PDF aren't rendered properly). I know ImageMagick uses GhostScript to do the conversion and if I do it directly with gs I can get the desired results, but I'd rather use the convert library as it has other tools I'd like to leverage.

This command in GhostScript accomplishes the desired image:

gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha -sOutputFile=cover.png -r144 cover.pdf

I'm wondering is there any way to pass arguments through convert to GhostScript or am I stuck with calling GhostScript directly?

ghostscript png imagemagick pdf image
11 Answers

One can also use the command line utilities included in poppler-utils package:

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
pdftoppm --help
pdftocairo --help

Example:

pdftocairo -png mypage.pdf mypage.png
user_14753310

As this page also lists alternative tools I'll mention xpdf which has command line tools ready compiled for Linux/Windows/Mac. Supports transparency. Is free for commercial use - opposed to Ghostscript which has truly outrageous pricing.

In a test on a huge PDF file it was 7.5% faster than Ghostscript.

(It also has PDF to text and HTML converters)

user_24045410

Try to extract a single page.

$page = 4

gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha -dFirstPage="$page" -dLastPage="$page" -o thumb.png -r144 input.pdf
user_85027290

My solution is much simpler and more direct. At least it works that way on my PC (with the following specs): 

me@home: my.folder$ uname -a
Linux home 3.2.0-54-generic-pae #82-Ubuntu SMP Tue Sep 10 20:29:22 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

with

me@home: my.folder$ convert --version
Version: ImageMagick 6.6.9-7 2012-08-17 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2011 ImageMagick Studio LLC
Features: OpenMP

So, here's what I run on my file.pdf:

me@home: my.folder$ convert -density 300 -quality 100 file.pdf file.png
user_7506700

You can use ImageMagick without separating the first page of the PDF with other tools. Just do

convert -density 288 cover.pdf[0] -resize 25% cover.png


Here I increase the nominal density by 400% (72*4=288) and then resize by 1/4 (25%). This gives a much better quality for the resulting png.

However, if the PDF is CMYK, PNG does not support that. It would need to be converted to sRGB, especially if it has transparency, since Ghostscript cannot handle CMYK with alpha.

convert -density 288 -colorspace sRGB -resize 25% cover.pdf[0] cover.png
user_73557410
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