Make a screenshot every page of PDF file

Question

How can I make a screenshot from every page of PDF file and save result as images in PHP? Is it possible?

Answer 1

Maybe the "make a screenshot" can be replaced for your purpose by "create a raster image" for each PDF page?

In this case you could use ImageMagick and/or one of its PHP-enabled libraries. Here is a command line representation:

 convert some.pdf[15-19] some.png

This will convert not all pages, but the page range 16--20 (page counting here is zero-based (not intuitive, I know...). To convert all pages, just skip the [15-19] part.

The output PNG names will be some-0.png, some-1.png, ... some-4.png.

To create JPEG or GIF instead of PNG, simply use one of these:

 convert some.pdf[15-19] some.jpg
 convert some.pdf[15-19] some.gif

By default ImageMagick will use a resolution of 72 PPI. This will indirectly determine the image dimensions of the PNG/JPEG/GIF output. Should you need other output dimensions than the defaults, you have different options, for example:

1. either add -density
2. or add -resize

to the command line:

convert -density 200 some.pdf some.png

convert some.pdf -resize 50% some.png