How to convert a PDF to PNG with ImageMagick “convert” or Ghostscript?

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You can use one commandline with two commands (gs, convert) connected through a pipe, if the first command can write its output to stdout, and if the second one can read its input from stdin.

  1. Luckily, gs can write to stdout (... -o %stdout ...).
  2. Luckily, convert can read from stdin (convert -background transparent - output.png).

Problem solved:

  • GS used for alpha channel handling a special image,
  • convert used for creating transparent background,
  • pipe used to avoid writing out a temp file on disk.

Complete solution: 

gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha       \
   -o %stdout              \
   -r144 cover.pdf         \
   |                       \
convert                    \
   -background transparent \
   -                       \
    cover.png

Update

If you want to have a separate PNG per PDF page, you can use the %d syntax:

gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha -o file-%03d.png -r144 cover.pdf

This will create PNG files named page-000.png, page-001.png, … (Note that the %d-counting is zero-based — file-000.png corresponds to page 1 of the PDF, 001 to page 2…

Or, if you want to keep your transparent background, for a 100-page PDF, do

for i in {1..100}; do        \
                             \
  gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha       \
     -dFirstPage="${i}"      \
     -dLastPage="${i}"       \
     -o %stdout              \
     -r144 input.pdf         \
     |                       \
  convert                    \
     -background transparent \
     -                       \
      page-${i}.png ;        \
                             \
done

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