Generating PDF thumbnails

Had the need recently to generate a bunch of thumbnails for some PDFs we had. ImageMagick to the rescue.

for P in `ls *.pdf`
  do echo $P
  outfile="thumbs/`echo $P|cut -d . -f 1`.jpg"
  convert -quality 50 -geometry 64x82 $P[0] $outfile
done

The [0] tells it to only do the first page, and the quality setting of 50 created thumbnails that were only 2-4K, but still quite functional for the purpose.

If not already pulled in as a dependency, Ghostscript (/usr/bin/gs) will need to be installed too.

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