Converting a PDF to PNG

Question

I\'m trying to convert a PDF to a PNG image (at least the cover of one). I\'m successfully extracting the first page of the PDF with pdftk. I\'m using imagemagick to do the

Answer 1

Couldn't get the accepted answer to work. Then found out that actually the solution is much simpler anyway as Ghostscript not just natively supports PNG but even multiple different "encodings":

• png256
• png16
• pnggray
• pngmono
• ...

The shell command that works for me is:

gs -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pnggray -r500 -dBATCH -dFirstPage=2 -dLastPage=2 -sOutputFile=test.png test.pdf

It will save page 2 of test.pdf to test.png using the pnggray encoding and 500 DPI.