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tictac08
Inspiring
April 12, 2007
Answered

Create low resolution pdf and thumbnails

  • April 12, 2007
  • 3 replies
  • 2689 views
We have an archive of 3000+ pdfs in high resolution, ready to print and new ones are coming in every day.
Some of these are 80+ Mb in size.

We want to put these available for download, but in low resolution.
Can someone tell me how i can

- Downsample the high resolution pdf files to low resolution pdfs, having 72 dpi images.
- Extract the first page as a pdf in low resolution.
- Create thumbnails of the first page, in jpg, width: 200 pixels.

I've tried many solutions already from ghostscript to iText, acrobat pro, pdf2image and cfx_pdf.
All of these programs seemed to bring nice results at first sight but all have let me down.
They can't handle jpeg2000, add borders and invisible layers to the pdf, etc.

We're currently working with automate and acrobat pro, but acrobat crashes all the time.

We are looking for something reliable, that we can execute from coldfusion with COM/Java or command prompt.

I'm interested hearing from your feedback, thanks in advance.
    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer tictac08
    tictac08 wrote:
    >> it's an example of how to talk to flex data service or livecycle.
    > The article doesn't once mention livecycle.

    fds==livecycle.

    > I bothered and the Livecycle link doesn't say "you can downsample a pdf with
    > this program".
    > Neither do you.

    nope but it's a start, got anything better?

    Hi,

    I found the solution I was looking for.
    I will post it here so if someone has the same problem, he doesn't have to waste the time I did.

    You will need 1 program and 2 plug-ins, all of them aren't free to say the least.
    - Adobe Acrobat Professional
    - Quite a box of tricks ( http://www.quite.com/box/) - 200 EURO
    - Autobatch ( http://www.evermap.com/autobatch.asp) - 120 EURO

    These tools allow to downsample a whole directory of PDFs from the command line (CLI) to 72 dpi.

    You can create a 'batch processing' with 'quite a box of tricks' so it will downsample all images in a PDF to 72dpi.
    Autobatch is a program that creates batch files (.bat) that run a 'batch processing' in acrobat professional.
    Coldfusion can execute this batch file, and you can create a scheduled task to do it regularly.

    However this solution only works under Windows and Mac.
    Should you run a Free operation system, write a letter to Adobe to convince them to release Acrobat professional under linux, *BSD, whatever. Because they should.

    Best regards

    3 replies

    N
    Neo Rye
    Inspiring
    April 12, 2007
    - Extract the first page as a pdf in low resolution.
    - Create thumbnails of the first page, in jpg, width: 200 pixels.

    Here's something you can try for these 2 issues. I haven't tried it with PDFs, but not sure why it wouldn't work. Please let me know if you get it to work.

    We use a free custom tag from http://www.efflare.com/download/ called cfx_url2bmp.zip that can take a URL and turn it into a bitmap. Once you had the image, you could turn that into a thumbnail with your favorite image tag. We use their cfx_imagecr tag and it works great.

    We use that cfx_url2bmp to create thumbs of web documents (email templates), from our database. We created a .cfm page to loop over templates we haven't done yet and load them into the URL and "snap" thier picture with cfx_url2bmp and then use cfx_imagecr to thumb it.

    Seems you could do the same thing with PDF's as long as the browser on the server your were using to do the surfing had Acrobat installed.

    A stretch, but maybe...

    N
    Newsgroup_User
    Inspiring
    April 12, 2007
    tictac08 wrote:
    > - Downsample the high resolution files to low resolution pdfs, having 72 dpi
    > images.

    using cfdocument or the library that drives it (iText) already defaults to 72
    DPI for images.
    T
    tictac08Author
    Inspiring
    April 13, 2007
    >using cfdocument or the library that drives it (iText) already defaults to 72 DPI for images.

    I apologise if my first post wasn’t clear.
    I'm trying to convert a high resolution pdf to a low resolution pdf. I don't think cfdocument or iText can do this.
    http://www.junlu.com/msg/133570.html
    Multivalent (java) is something I also tried but it removes images.

    I was more thinking of using one of the adobe products...
    Is Adobe® LiveCycle® PDF Generator what I'm looking for, or Acrobat Professional?
    Can it be used from Coldfusion (COM)?
    Can it be used from command prompt?
    Does someone have an example of this?
    A
    Anonymous
    April 12, 2007
    You may want to look at http://www.robgonda.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/12/27/Better-image-manipulation-quality-with-ASPJpeg
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