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

[ChristianBahnsen]

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

[lrosenth · Accepted solution]

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

[ChristianBahnsen]

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?

If not, I'll try a method described at https://www.codeproject.com/articles/5887/generate-thumbnail-images-from-pdf-documents

Thanks for the reply,

Chris

[lrosenth]

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

[ChristianBahnsen]

Please share/suggest the method(s) you'd recommend for programmatically generating thumbnails/images from PDFs, then we can close this thread as answered.

[lrosenth]

Depends on what programming language/environment you are using…

You can look at plugins (C/C++) or JavaScript, for example

[KabirWadhwa]

Hi, were you able to do this? If yes, could you share the relevant resources.Thanks.