Quick tutorial on converting PDF files to PNG using ImageMagick in CentOS.
Foreplay: install ImageMagick
First, install ImageMagick using yum. As ImageMagick is not available, you need to activate the EPEL repository in your CentOS installation.
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.rpm
Edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo and change enabled=0 to enabled=1 in the [epel] section. You can alternatively use yum with –enablerepo epel
if you don’t want to enable epel by default.
Next, install ImageMagick:
yum install ImageMagick
With ImageMagick installed, go to the folder where you have your PDF file.
The Act itself
In this example we are converting a multipage PDF file named “flags.pdf”. This PDF has 13 pages, each page has a flag, so the aim is to generate one PNG per PDF page. The simple approach is just to convert it directly:
convert flags.pdf flag.png
This creates 14 files named flag-0.png to flag-13.png. The downside of this simple approach is that you have no control over the size, alpha channels or any other aspect of the output file, but it is always worth a try – think of this as the “i’m feeling lucky” approach. If the defaults are not good enough, here are the parameters you need to play with:
- -verbose
- -depth [i]: force the output color depth: 8, 24 or 32 for alpha transparency
- -resize [%]: the default output is not anti-aliased, therefore ugly as s**t. This parameter will resize the original, use 50% for best results
- -density [dpi]: as far as i can tell, the only mechanism available to control the target PNG resolution…
More options are available in the official documentation.
In my case, this was the option that worked best:
convert -verbose -depth 32 -density 100 -resize 50% flags.pdf flag.png
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