generate images from pdf

  • I apologize in advance for he question, but I am getting really confused about this feature. I have a site in a shared hosting environment where I use the PDF Thumbnail plugin; this generates a thumbnail image (jpg) from the first page of any uploaded pdf. The plugin works fine (even if obsolete), and I find it extremely useful. In another site (another host) the plugin does not work, and I found out because the host does not support ImageMagick and Ghostwriter: apparently, the other host does, and this seems to be the exception….

    Searching in Internet, I came to the conclusion that you simply cannot automatically generate the image from pdf without imagemagick and ghostscript, so the only alternative is to generate the image beforehand and then upload it together with the pdf. Then I read about the enhanced pdf handling introduced by WordPress 4.7: bingo (I thougth). False alarm: also the enhanced WP feature requires ImageMagick and Ghostscript…..

    Now my question is: since many hosts refuse to install ImageMagick and Ghostscript (I imagine they must have some good reasons for that), really is there no other way to generate jpg from pdf, without using those products?

    Thank you

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  • Take a look at this ancient plugin, I recently had success with it in such a case: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/gs-only-pdf-preview/ – of course there is always a risk due to the age of the plugin. However, I don’t know any other possibility without changing the hosting.

    Thread Starter roberto21

    (@roberto21)

    Thank you for the suggestion. I have already tried that: the plugin cannot be activated because it relies on the EXEC directive, that is disabled by the installation. Bad luck.

    Then the only thing left to do is to change the hoster if they don’t want to support you. Since these are server-side components that are necessary for this, WordPress cannot offer a ready-made solution.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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