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Feb 19, 2018

Converting PDF files - the quick way

Some days ago I was at office and I needed to convert some PDF files into PNG images. Nothing really difficult, there are so many applications doing that, but the quickest I know was and still is Ghostscript. I really love the command line approach, moreover when I have to deal with multiple files, however every time I need to look for the right switches in the on-line help. Since I hadn't ghostscript for Windows at hand, I just fired up my Icaros Desktop virtual machine, imported all PDF files I needed to convert, and exported the resulting PNG files a few minutes later. Quick. Functional. Easy. But since it's not the first time I run Icaros Desktop just for this specific task, I decided to add a PDF -> PNGs option to PDF file type in Dopus 5. That way, just selecting the file and this option would do the trick. I also decided to include this in mainstream Icaros, even though at the moment there is a little shortcoming: PDF file name and path must not include spaces. Maybe I will find a way to fix this as well, but starting from Icaros 2.2.2 you should be able to convert your files with a couple of mouse clicks. Default resolution will be 150 dpi, which should be enough to render readable texts and detailed images. 

ZuneView showing results of a conversion

Example of converted page