Re: Better PDF/PS/Dia thumbnailers

[Martin Sevior <msevior physics unimelb edu au>]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Peter Harvey wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Since I have a large collection of PostScript and PDF files I found the
> thumbnailers posted (by Keith Conger?) very useful, but not fast enough.
> So I have modified them to improve both quality and speed. When
> installed these new scripts provide nice 128x128 thumbnails for:
>  - PDF files
>  - PostScript files
>  - Dia diagrams
> 
> They are essentially wrapper scripts around varying combinations of
> Ghostscript, ImageMagick's convert program, and Dia.
> 
> HIGHLIGHTS:
>  - Fast generation of thumbnails on poorly-written Postscript.
>    Only renders the first page using GhostScript, piping the result to
>    ImageMagick which then scales it to generate the thumbnail.
>  - Uses if statements to try and find the best tool for the job.
>  - Robust handling of strange filenames (spaces, hypens, etc.)
> 
> LICENSE:
>  - Go ahead, butcher it, copy it, rename it, change the author.
>    I just hope it makes it into Gnome. :)
> 
> Latest version available from:
> http://www.dsl.uow.edu.au/~harvey/code/thumbnailer.tar.gz
> 

Way cool :-) I'll look into this code to see if I can get AbiWord to make 
thumbnails of doc,rtf,dsdw,abw,kwd,html etc files.

(The idea would be to extract the first few lines of text and place it 
inside a icon like the current text thumbnail does.)

Anyway this gives a starting point for this work.

Cheers.

Martin