Acrobat DC: does the CreateThumbs method create the thumbs internally or externally?

I'm looking at the CreateThumbs method of AcroExch.PDDoc, but the documentation is pretty thin.

Are the thumbnails it creates internal to the PDF or are they some kind of image file (.jpg, .png, .gif, etc) external to the PDF itself?

If they're external, where are they saved to? The only parameters for the method are the page range.

I'm creating the COM object via Powershell:

$a = New-Object -ComObject AcroExch.PDDoc

But I'm not sure how to proceed from there. Should I open a PDF document using the Open method? E.g.,

$a.Open('file path\filename.pdf')

If I use the CreateThumbs to create a thumb of just the first page, e.g.,

$a.CreateThumbs(0,0)

Powershell replies "True", but where's the thumb created?

Thanks for any guidance ...

Christian Bahnsen

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer lrosenth

Don’t bother – embedded thumbnails are deprecated and should not be used.

lrosenthCorrect answer

Adobe Employee

Don’t bother – embedded thumbnails are deprecated and should not be used.

Inspiring

Bummer. I was looking for a way to generate an thumbnail of the first page of a PDF to an image file like jpg or png.

Is there a way to generate external thumbnail images programmatically via AcroExch.PDDoc?

Thanks for the reply,

Chris

Adobe Employee

Not using that method, but there are other ways to automate Acrobat for creating such images.

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