matthew ephraim

A few months ago, I posted some code that I had used to generate thumbnail images from PDF files. Before writing the code, I had searched high and low for some simple code that would allow me to take a PDF file and generate a thumbnail from the first page of that PDF file. Unfortunately, I didn’t find many C# solutions. The best I could find was the Ghostscript library and some references to using it from C#.

In my previous post, I talked about some of the issues I had with using Ghostscript from the command line. It wasn’t difficult, but it wasn’t something that I wanted to do. Finally, I ended up writing a C# wrapper that would talk to the Ghostscript library and generate the PDF thumbnail files that I wanted. I figured it was a common enough issue that at least someone else would find it useful.

Almost immediately, that post became the most popular post on my site. I still get 10 or so Google hits from it every day. So, I figured I’d clean up the code a little bit (which involved some helpful changes that people suggested in the comments of my post) and release it to the world.

I decided to call the library GhostscriptSharp and you can find it on Github. There are probably a lot of things that could be added or cleaned up, so if you’d like to contribute, feel free to create your own fork and let me know if you have changes I could pull in.

Tags: Ghostscript, GhostscriptSharp

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 11:46 pm and is filed under C#. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.