How to Convert a Pdf Document to a Preview Image in PHP

How do I convert a PDF document to a preview image in PHP?

You need ImageMagick and GhostScript

<?php
$im = new imagick('file.pdf[0]');
$im->setImageFormat('jpg');
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
echo $im;
?>

The [0] means page 1.

Preview a PDF file in browser with PHP

You must not have a var_dump() before the headers (unless you use output buffering without telling us). There must not be any output before sending headers. Also, if you use var_dump() to dump the PDF's contents that will introduce surrounding artifacts which probably cause problems with most PDF viewers.

For troubleshooting, please try this minimal working example:

<?php
$path = './path/to/file.pdf';

header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename='.$path);
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');

readfile($path);

Just as an aside, it is generally also a good idea not to use a closing PHP tag (?>) in order to avoid any unwanted accidental whitespace at the end of the file, which could be causing problems; and to stick with one type of quite marks ' or " for your strings.

Php pdf image preview code

You must to pass as parameter a path to PDF file, not only the string 'pdf': http://php.net/imagick.construct

If $article['pdf'] contains it you must to use:

$im = new imagick(realpath($pdf) . '[0]');

$im still being a resource that contains a object instance of imagick, and not the image or pdf document itself, so you must to do this to inline image in HTML (if you want to use JPEG, I would use PNG):

<img src="data:image/jpg;base64,<?php
echo base64_encode($im->getImageBlob());
?> " WIDTH="98%" border="1" title="<?php
echo htmlspecialchars("$title - $author");
?>  " caption="Click here to open PDF"  />

Note the usage of htmlspecialchars ( http://php.net/htmlspecialchars ) to output strings to navigator and getImageBlob ( http://php.net/imagick.getimageblob ) to get image data (if available) and finally I will encode it in base64 to inline it in HTML document.

If you want to link to a cached version of image you must to save it in a temporary file or create another PHP script to generate the image from PDF file.

Best regards,

Edit 1: How to create a JPEG thumbnail, from PHP manual:

You should read this: http://php.net/imagick.setimageformat#89210

This example will help you:

// convert to JPEG
$im->setImageColorspace(255);
$im->setCompression(Imagick::COMPRESSION_JPEG);
$im->setCompressionQuality(60);
$im->setImageFormat('jpeg');

Probably you will wish to reduce image size:

$im->resizeImage(290, 375, imagick::FILTER_LANCZOS, 1);

And remember to import the page number (beginning with 0, not 1) adding '[0]' to file name as edited.

Good luck!

Creating PDF thumbnail in PHP and caching it

I know it's been discussed here:

Should I use a PHP extension for ImageMagick or just use PHP's Exec() function to run the terminal commands?

And to quote drew101:

You would benefit a lot using the PHP extensions instead of using exec
or similar functions. Built in extensions will be faster and use less
memory as you will not have to spawn new processes and read the output
back. The image objects will be directly available in PHP instead of
having to read file output, which should make the images easier to
work with.

If you have a busy site, creating lots of processes to edit images may
start to slow things down and consume additional memory.

Create a thumbnail preview of documents (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc.) in PHP (LAMP)

It's not easy to convert certain document formats to image. php alone cannot do this.
The 'proper' way to do this is to first of all have the program installed on your server that can open the document in that format.
For example, for .doc documents you can use OpenOffice
it also can open most other document formats
You then need to setup your open office to work in 'headless' mode, sending the output to virtual display (XVFB is what you going to need on Linux)

You php script will then call OpenOffice, passing the path to uploaded doc. OpenOffice will actually open that doc. Then you need to create an image from the screen buffer. You can use ImageMagick for that

Then once you have the capture of your screen you can resize it to a thumbnail.

Look at this link for more details

http://www.mysql-apache-php.com/website_screenshot.htm

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