ImageMagick convert pdf to jpeg has poor text quality after upgrading ImageMagick version to 6.7.8

Question

After upgrading ImageMagick text quality got degraded when convert pdf to jpeg:

Old image

New Image Conversion command: convert foo.pdf foo.jpeg

Old ImageMagick version:

[root@home]#  convert -version Version: ImageMagick 6.2.8 05/07/12 Q16 file:/usr/share/ImageMagick-6.2.8/doc/index.html Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2006 ImageMagick Studio LLC 

generated files size:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 139K Apr  2 16:11 foo-0.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 130K Apr  2 16:11 foo-1.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 334K Mar 24 14:27 foo.pdf 

After upgrading ImageMagick

[root@home]#  convert -version Version: ImageMagick 6.7.8-10 2012-08-17 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2012 ImageMagick Studio LLC Features: OpenMP 

generated files size:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  60K Apr  2 16:11 foo-0.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  55K Apr  2 16:11 foo-1.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 334K Mar 24 14:27 foo.pdf 

I've tried using antialias flag:

convert -antialias  foo.pdf foo.jpeg 

Which did nothing, I've tried setting an higher quality:

convert -quality 100 foo.pdf foo.jpeg 

and super sampling:

convert -density 288 -background white -alpha off foo.pdf -resize 25%  foo.jpeg 

both gave bigger files and better results, but ran more time and had lower quality that the old ImageMagick version.

any advises?

Link to the file

Answer 1

I see the same problem with your sample file. It looks like ImageMagick's delegates for the PDF conversion may have changed with the new install.

If you try convert -verbose foo.pdf foo.jpeg, do you see -sDEVICE=pngalpha in the command that gets sent to gs? The pnmraw device has been used in the past, and switching back to that seems to fix the problem for me.

In ImageMagick's delegates.xml file (which may be in /etc/ImageMagick, but could be somewhere else depending on your setup), look for the decode="ps:alpha" delegate line and change -sDEVICE=pngalpha in the command to -sDEVICE=pnmraw. (You can probably just search for pngalpha in the file.)