Convert a PDF file into a single Image using ImageMagick

6 Comments

June 18th, 2010 07:52 am

Good tip. I use this fairly regularly. Another important option is to use the -density switch when doing the conversion to control the resolution of the resulting image. I deal with drawings provided in pdf form with dimensions and fairly small text notes etc. These are usually in a vector form in the pdf. If I want to have this as a usable png file to touch up or modify in the Gimp say, I need it fairly high res. So I might do: convert -density 300 input.pdf output.png This will create a png file using 300 dots per inch to convert the vector pdf file into the bitmap format. So you'll end up with a significantly larger image file than if you used say 100.

shredder12

June 18th, 2010 11:51 am

Hi Richard, thanks for this great advice. I haven't dealt with such conversions often so am not aware of various options convert provides, but this will certainly be helpful to a lot of users with similar issues.

Micah Cochran (not verified)

June 18th, 2010 07:46 pm

I also use this on a regular basis. I am usually take high resolution PDFs (ranging from letter to ARCH E) and scaling them down to fit on a browser. I use unsharp mask to bring out thin lines on the drawing so I'd add the option, -unsharp flag. The thing that keeps me coming back is that I can specify the resulting image size by using -resize WIDTHxHEIGHT. The nice thing is that one can be omitted and it will automatically calculate the other dimension. If I am converting a tall image for a web browser, I will typically use -resize x750 I also ghostscript (IM is a heck of a lot simpler with the command line). Recently, I discovered that PDFCreator (windows) can all do the conversion to a particular DPI. Also, GIMP can do the conversion using both DPI and resize, but I have yet to compare the results with IM. The only qualm I have with ImageMagick is in converting PDF file it can be little slow. Now, I only wish there was a VectorMagick for a toolkit for PDF, SVG, AI, EMF, etc.

Julia (not verified)

September 15th, 2010 08:18 pm

Is there a Python version of ImageMagick? I know there is one for PERL, but I mostly code in Python... Tried asking the dudes in StackOverflow, but no response so far.

Micah Cochran (not verified)

September 17th, 2010 04:49 pm

Julia, ImageMagick is written in C and has interfaces for many languages on the ImageMagick homepage including Python. There are two interfaces for Python.

Bogi Dewd (not verified)

September 23rd, 2010 07:51 pm

Why not just combine it into one command? You get one file whether the pdf is a single page or multiple pages... convert file.pdf -append image.png My 2 cents...