how to transform a pdf document into an image.. ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I would like to display in my app the image of the cover page af an pdf document produced internnally within my app ( wich plugin should be better ... ? pdfwrite ?... generally it will be a less than 2 pages document) on the home page I would like to display the cover pages as png or jpg with a link to the document or another action...

thanks for your suggestions

erwin

2

1. We're using PDF:Writer and it should be fine with a small, 2 page document that you're describing.

2. We're doing exactly the sort of image conversion that you're describing via RMagick. We'd originally installed RMagick for use with the early versions of acts_as_attachment (necessary for image uploading). It has some well-documented memory leaks, though. The code below is based on attachment_fu/acts_as_attachment but should be easily enough adapted:

file_path = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "public", @image.public_filename) img = Magick::Image::read(file_path) img[0].write File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "public", "images", "temp_pdf.jpg")

(I'm off to get that last bit cleaned up... as is, each user will clobber the other :frowning:

3

For image attachments and showing their thumbnails, Paperclip is a good alternative to attachment_fu. It doesn’t need RMagick, but it does need ImageMagick. Here’s the introductory blog post:

http://giantrobots.thoughtbot.com/2008/3/18/for-attaching-files-use-paperclip

Googling for

rails paperclip

produces lots of relevant hits.

Regards, Craig