[pajamabama]

I've found several ways of converting a pdf to image. The problem is, they all come out like crap. Is there a way to control the quality of the conversion? Or is there a better way to do it?

Here's what I've found:
1) Good old GIMP can open a PDF and save as whatever. Image quality sucks.

2) ImageMagick (convert command) has the same problem.

Also, both require splitting the original PDF into idividual pages first since both only use page 1 when they open it. Is there a utility that can perhaps split it for you? I've had to use 'Print to PDF' for the current page only to do this.

One point to note is that the PDF also looks like crap in KGhostView but great in Acrobat Reader. So it seems like the ghostscript conversion is poo. How can I change this?

Thanks.

[farslayer]

Are you sure the conversion is poor or is the resultant image file just rendering poorly in your viewer..

I've seen cases where tiff files look like garbage on the monitor but when I print them out they look perfectly fine..

Just a thought..

[pajamabama]

well, I've actually tried it a bit more, with different pdf files, and it seems to be more related to a particular file. So maybe the one I was trying to use before was just bad quality to begin with and somehow acrobat reader was able to compensate for it better than gsview.

wutevu...

[darrenkitchens]

try using gs. I do this quite a bit and on a large scale. the command I use is:
gs -SDEVICE=tiffg4 -r600x600 -sPAPERSIZE=letter -sOutputFile={output folder}/{basename}_%04d.tif -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -- {pdf filename}

you can change the -SDEVICE to jpeg if you are dealing with color, the -r is resolution ( I think default is 72dpi) the %04d.tiff appends the tifs with a 4 digit sequence starting with 0001. the -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH are the options that you use for multipage pdf to a batch of tiffs. (i.e. a 100 page pdf will get you 100 tif files).