Hi designserve,

Will these PDF thumbnails be placed one at a time per page or will there be entire pages of them?

Hi MrK,

I would like both one at a time and many (on different pages). If I had to choose between them it would be one at a time.

Thanks,
Mike

Regarding the conversion, this could be done programmatically, through command line, graphics editors like Photoshop, and through dedicated tools.

A command line option is using convert in ImageMagick (which is supposed to be very fast). This converts them one at a time.
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php...
http://codetheory.in/convert-split-pdf-files-into-images-with-image...
http://www.binarytides.com/convert-pdf-image-imagemagick-commandlin...

There is batch processing with mogrify.
"Mogrify uses almost the same options and the same syntax that the Convert utility but the main difference between these two utilities is: Convert can save the image processing tasks in a new file but Mogrify overwrites them on the file that it is working on"

http://rafaelsteil.com/converting-multiple-pdf-files-into-jpg-using...
- this tutorial does not explain converting a specific page though
- it makes me wonder if you can add [0] while using mogrify, I imagine you should be able to

You could use a block to place them on the page. The block would have at least two inputs, one for picking the PDF and one for picking the JPG. It could handle making the JPG a thumbnail and creating the link to the PDF.

Thank you very much for your help.

I was hoping that there might be an addon or similar that would be able to display a thumbnail of the first page. I think I'm going to have to generate the thumbnails using one of the methods you've described (thanks) and then maybe use Magic Data to pull PDF and thumbnails of the same name into Uber List or Universal Content Puller. That's the best way I can think of to automate some of it for now.

I appreciate your reply.
Mike

A trick I have used is to create an alt-thumbnail image/file attribute for files. You can then use that to associate your thumbnail images with pdf files. When listing, you can check that attribute and, if it exists, serve up- the thumbnail file in the attribute. Else serve the standard c5 thumbnail.

Or you could forget about the attribute trick and use some MD to look for files with a named association, swapping .pdf to _thumb.png or similar when showing the list.

Neither of the above helps with easy generation of the thumbnails for the pdf's. I would probably set it up as a batch job in photoshop and then upload and (if using attributes) associate the attributes manually, or use a one off Magic Data job to make a named association and fill in the attributes. Named association would skip that hassle, but is generally a less robust way of managing it.

Thanks JTF,

I'll give some of that a go.

Loving Magic Data and the other addons. They do everything I never knew I wanted :D

Mike