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Use GhostScript to Export Specified Pages from a PDF as Clear PNG Files

Images exported from PDF files with ImageMagick are usually not clear enough. Because GhostScript can parse the underlying PDF data, it can produce clearer ima…

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Images exported from PDF files with ImageMagick are usually not clear enough. Because GhostScript can parse the underlying PDF data, it can produce clearer image files.

The command I use is as follows:

gs \
 -sDEVICE=png16 \
 -o %03d.png \
 -dTextAlphaBits=4 \
 -dAlignToPixels=1 \
 -dFirstPage=1 \
 -dLastPage=1 \
 -r300 \
  file.pdf

To explain, if the page you want to export has only a few colors, you can specify DEVICE as png256 or png16 to reduce the size of the generated file; if the exported page has only black and white, you can use pngmono. If the page you want to export contains an image with very rich detail, I recommend using jpeg format. In general, if you want the exported image to remain very clear when printed, it is best to specify the DPI as 300; otherwise, 110 is sufficient.

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