[plug] ImageMagicking PDFs

[ryan at is.as.geeky.as]

I am trying to make a thumbnail of the FIRST page of a PDF document.

mogrify barfs on the large graphics intensive PDFs I actually want to
thumbnail, but works find on smaller test ones I make.  To overcome this i
used pdf2ps (from gs-aladdin) to make a huge (111Mb) ps file out of a pdf
file.  That took about 10-15 minutes on this here PII and then the same time
to make a jpeg of each page using mogrify from that ps file.

Does anyone know a way to specify only 1 page in the pdf->ps conversion
process?  Or even better, a command line tool to cut 1 specific page from a
pdf into a separate pdf document before this entire process?  I know
ghostview can export specific pages, but that has to be running in GUI mode.

For obvious time reasons, the less of the PDF file the method uses to
extract the first page the better.

Ryan's "probably not very useful but I found it interesting" tip of the day:
============================================================================
As something cool to do, mogrify will make animated optionally scaled
animated GIFs of PDF files so all the pages loop in the image.  A 30 page
(338Kb) PDF I converted to a 51x70 thumbnail size resulted in an 83Kb
animated GIF. (mogrify -format gif -geometry 51x70 input.pdf)  The 64 Page
'graphics intensive' PDF i mentioned earlier that is about 1.1Mb turned out
as a 200Kb 51x70 GIF.

Ryan.