Converting a PDF to PNG

Question

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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

For a PDF that ImageMagick was giving inaccurate colors I found that GraphicsMagick did a better job:

$ gm convert -quality 100 -thumbnail x300 -flatten journal.pdf\[0\] cover.jpg

Answer 3

Couldn't get the accepted answer to work. Then found out that actually the solution is much simpler anyway as Ghostscript not just natively supports PNG but even multiple different "encodings":

• png256
• png16
• pnggray
• pngmono
• ...

The shell command that works for me is:

gs -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pnggray -r500 -dBATCH -dFirstPage=2 -dLastPage=2 -sOutputFile=test.png test.pdf

It will save page 2 of test.pdf to test.png using the pnggray encoding and 500 DPI.

Answer 4

Here is a german discussion about a problem like this for SVG files where it is solved by using

convert -background transparent

Perhaps this works for you, too.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

To convert pdf to image files use following commands:

For PNG gs -sDEVICE=png16m -dTextAlphaBits=4 -r300 -o a.png a.pdf

For JPG gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -dTextAlphaBits=4 -r300 -o a.jpg a.pdf

If you have multiple pages add to name %03d gs -o a%03d.jpg a.pdf

What each option means:

• sDEVICE={jpeg,pngalpha,png16m...} - filetype
• -o - output file (%stdout to stdout)
• -dTextAlphaBits=4 - font antialiasing.
• -r300 - 300 dpi