Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Hello all,

I am using imagemagick to convert a 1st page of pdf to a thumbnail.

I am using command -
However when the pdf is large i,e around 9mbs the time taken on my machine is around 2mins.

So how can I decrease the time to convert - maybe use a better / optimized command?
Since I only want the first page, if the command can just iterate over the first page, convert and ends the process.

Thanks,
Ankush

What version of IM and what platform? Please always provide that.

Probably won't make a difference, but proper IM syntax woulud have your -gravity before the crop.

IM uses ghostscript to read PDF files. So if there is a limitation, it is in ghostscript.

What is mbs? Do you mean mega bytes or mega bits?

OS - Ubuntu 14.04
IM Version - 6.7.7 and 7.0.1
the file size is over 9MB (Mega Bytes) .

I'll look into Ghostscript.
Any other solutions would be helpful.

Ok, so i found there a solution
If I use the following -

gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -o test2.jpg file.pdf

I get the result in seconds.
So I can do with on 2 things here -
a) I can change the command line params to gs
b) Find out imagemagic-convert params equivalent to -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1

You can change the gs params in the delegates.xml file.

Alright I added -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 in delegate.xml, Its still taking a lot of time when I run the same command. Irrespective of whether I give file.pdf[0] or file.pdf

Obviously, IM is evaluating the whole file again. But it should just convert 1st page. What do you think seems to be issue?

"-verbose" will show the GS command used, so may provide some insight.