Making PDF icons

Is there a nice, simple way to make an icon from the 1st page of a pdf?

@Nuder_Try

What I'd probably do:

View the PDF, then grab the page with SGrab. Save as e.g. PNG.

Scale the resulting picture to the desired size (I normally use homecooked scripts and NetPBM, but there are loads of tools that can do that).

Using any old icon (of the correct type, e.g. project or tool) renamed as <your file>.info, call up icon information (assuming you use RaWBInfo). Use the menu to load your picture as icon image, then save the icon.

Note: Haven't tested my description, but something like that ...

Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

Used fxPaint to scale the image, looks like I've a good weekend's work ahead of me, took about 5 minutes to get the first one done. :)

Thanks!

@Nuder_Try
Another possibility is to open the PDF in AmiGS, select print, change the output divice to PNG or JPEG, set the Print range to current page, set the resolution to 600x600, enter an output file and print the page to an image file.

@Nuder_Try

Great idea!

I had never thought of this before; but it is now a feature of the new IconEditor I just uploaded to OS4Depot.

Any page of a PDF can be imported as an icon using the regular methods (either using the "Open" menu option or drag-and-drop). Additionally, there is a menu option for batch processing multiple PDFs at once---automatically giving them icons from the first page of the files.

Thanks to Andreas for his Polybios Hollywood plugin!

PEB,

Great News! Thank you!

Hi guys,

Doesn't all this rewquire that one has to install the
PNG icons plug-in? The straight OS doesn't support
PNG files as .info files, IIRC.

Thanks,

PJS

@pjs

RAWBInfon will import any datatypes readable image format and save it inot the icon in the AmigaOS icon format (32bit direct mapped).

PNG is the better choice for converting a PDF to an image as you will get no jpeg artifacting. (most tools for this don't support ILBM directly).

@Thread
The latest version of SketchBlock Pro support saving an image directly as an icon so you can save out a page with ghostscript and scale that with SB and do any tweaking that might be required to get a good icon image out of it. (Unsharp mask , focus tool add glow etc)

Just need to find the time to put a release package together...

@pjs
If you use the SGRAB method or print to an image file with AmiGS, you would resize the image, load the image into a standard Amiga icon in the information window (rawbinfo) that is opened by the Workbench "Icons/Information menu. With those methods, you would be creating an Amiga icon and not a PNG icon. As far as I know, the Information window will load almost any type of image that there is a datatype for.

I don't know what kind of icon PEB's IconEditor creates.

More options are good! Will look into seeing which works best. Thanks all!