rootninja

I hate PDFs! I hate opening the viewer and sitting there, waiting for it to load, then dealing with the pop up asking me to update my software. I wish they were like regular text files or images, and not some twisted mutant hybrid of both with all the shortcomings from each side! So… now I just convert PDF’s to JPEG images!!! I love ImageMagick. It’s just so freaking useful… and free.

Here’s a very simple script to convert PDF’s to JPG’s:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/convert -colorspace RGB -resize 1024 -interlace none -density 300 -quality 85 $1 $1.jpg

Lets take the U.S. Immigration form for example. I downloaded the four page I-9.pdf from uscis.gov. It took 11 seconds on my machine to convert it into 4 jpeg image files. You could do a whole directory full of pdfs all at once in a matter of minutes. Print them, display them on the internet, or just view them in your favorite image/photo software. Easy access, and no PDF viewer needed at all!