Last updated on August 28, 2020 by Dan Nanni
While PDF (short for "Portable Document Format") is a widely used document format supported by a variety of applications on multiple platforms, you may want to convert PDF files to JPG format for several reasons. For example, you may want to embed a PDF file into PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress presentations, in which case JPG/JPEG images will be easier to work with. Converting a PDF file into JPG also makes it unnecessary to load a separate plugin or external application for web browsers to render it. If you are looking to convert PDF files to JPG/JPEG format on Linux, the following guide will help.
The easiest one-shot solution to convert a PDF file to JPG format is using ImageMagick. ImageMagic comes with a versatile command-line tool called convert
which can handle the conversion easily. Assuming that you have installed ImageMagic on your Linux system, run the following command to convert input.pdf
to output.jpg
.
$ convert input.pdf output.jpg
Note that if input.pdf
is a multi-page PDF file, the above command will produce as many JPG files as the number of pages in the PDF file (e.g., output-0.jpg
, output-1.jpg
, output-2
.jpg, etc).
convert
CommandOther usages of convert
command are illustrated as follows.
To convert a PDF file to a JPG image with JPEG compression level set to 50
:
$ convert -quality 50 input.pdf output.jpg
The -quality
option in the command specifies image compression level. For JPG images, an allowed compression level ranges from 1
(lowest quality and highest compression) to 100
(best quality and lowest compression).
To convert a PDF file to a JPG image with width 500px
:
$ convert -density 500 input.pdf output.jpg
To convert the first page of a PDF file into JPG image:
$ convert input.pdf[0] output.jpg
To convert multiple PDF files to JPG format in batch mode:
$ for i in `ls *.pdf`; do convert "$i" "$i".jpg; done
If you think that converting PDF files with convert
command takes too much memory to be completed properly, you can check the available resource on your system, and limit the resource usage of convert
command as follows.
$ identify -list resource
File Area Memory Map Disk Thread Time ------------------------------------------------------ 768 1.054GB 753.9MiB 1.9632GiB 18.446744EB 1 unlimited
$ convert -limit area 64MiB -limit memory 64MiB input.pdf output.jpg
When convert
performs conversion, it actually relies on Ghostscript to interpret PDF files. In fact, you can invoke Ghostscript directly to convert PDF files to JPG format. The advantage of doing so is that you don't have to install ImageMagick, but just use Ghostscript.
On Debian-based system:
$ sudo apt-get install ghostscript
On Red Hat-based system:
$ sudo yum install ghostscript
To convert a PDF file to JPG format with Ghostscript:
$ gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=jpeg -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=5 -sOutputFile=output%d.jpg -dJPEGQ=100 -r500 -q intput.pdf -c quit
The above command will generate a series of output files (image1.jpg
, image2.jpg
,..., image5.jpg
) for the first 5
pages of input.pdf
. The JPEG compression level is set to 100
, and output image resolution is set to 500px
(width).
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