Jed’s fridge door notes (a.k.a. “so i won’t forget”)

So you just downloaded your fresh torrents of comicbooks, magazines, etc and you want to convert each page into jpg. GhostScript comes to the rescue.

Let’s say you have a 100-page simpsons.pdf.

All you do is:

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=jpeg -r150 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dMaxStripSize=8192 -sOutputFile=homer_%d.jpg simpsons.pdf


And you’ll end up with a hundred homer_n.jpg pages of the simpsons.pdf e-book.

That’s it.

ImagMagick’s “convert foo.pdf bar.jpg” will actually do the same thing but if you have a pdf file with non-uniform sized pages convert will actually crop them to it’s default size, undesirably cropping the bigger pages.

*Update: 15 Aug. 2007

Had to use this again. Too long a line to type everytime you need to convert. Better make it into a script and save everybody else the hassle:


$ cat pdf2jpg.sh
#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 2 ];then
echo “Usage: $0 target.pdf outfile”
exit
fi

TARGET=$1
OUTFILE=$2

gs \
-dSAFER \
-dBATCH \
-dNOPAUSE \
-sDEVICE=jpeg \
-r150 \
-dTextAlphaBits=4 \
-dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 \
-dMaxStripSize=8192 \
-sOutputFile=${OUTFILE}_%d.jpg \
${TARGET}