I wanted to view a PDF on my PSP, but unfortunately the PDF was full of images so the usual viewer bookr didn’t want to load it. Luckily I managed to figure out how to convert the PDF into JPEGs so I could view them. Since I hadn’t found a guide in my searches, here is a rough guide of how I did it.
The Tool of choice for this exercise is ghostscript, in particular the command line component ‘gs’. Ghostscript is a PDF/PS interpreter, available on linux and windows (SF.net Download). The magical command line I used was:
gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -dJPEGQ=95 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dDOINTERPOLATE -sOutputFile=m_%d.jpg -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -r57x58 M.pdf
What does this all do?
- sDEVICE=jpeg -dJPEGQ=95
- Defines the image output format, there are alot of image types that can be saved, I chose JPEG as the PSP cannot view PNG images in the built in image viewer.
- The list of available outputs can be found by running gs with no command line arguments, or by visiting http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Devices.htm
- -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dDOINTERPOLATE
- Antialiasing settings, these make your output look the best. Use them.
- -sOutputFile=m_%d.png
- The output file name, %d implies you want to split images by page, the %d will be replaced with the page number.
- -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE
- Batch processing options, makes gs output all of the images without stopping and confirming.
- -r57x58
- Resolution of output images, I had to play with this a bit to get the exact numbers, depends on your input file too.
- M.pdf
- The name of the input file.
Anyway, so you run that and suprise suprise you get alot of images, ripe for viewing 🙂 Enjoy.
Wow! That is what i needed! Thak you VERY much!
But!
-sOutputFile=m_%d.png
not too good with-sDEVICE=jpeg
Haha true, I’ll fix that. Thanks 🙂
Hi.
Thanks for this article. You solved my Problem in no time!
(But it took me quite a time to discover this article)
Just what I was looking. However the quality is very poor, I can’t read the text that was on my original PDF, any suggestions on what to check to improve the output quality?
Check out the options for anti-aliasing etc here:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Use.htm#Rendering_parameters
-dAlignToPixels might help.
Hi,
It might sound basic but I can’t find gs.exe, I will appreciate any pointer to the executable.
Thanks.
Grab Ghostscript for windows:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1897&package_id=108733&release_id=617197
gs863w32.exe
It should be in there.
for windows its gswin32c instead of gs, and you will also need to add it to systemwnviroment variables.
Thanks for saving me several hours. Something I found necessary for some PDFs was -dUseCropBox, as some files will convert to .jpeg with incorrect margins, depending on their internal settings.
Thank you very much!!!
Saved my day.
thanks for this