- Posted by Graham on November 22, 2017
Tip of the Week: How to convert typeset PDF pages into raster image formats
Suppose you want to convert one or more pages of your typeset document’s PDF file into an image file format such as PNG or JPEG—for example, to use them in a web page or to produce graphics with nicely typeset text for sharing on social media. How can you do that?
Clearly, the conversion of pages in your document PDF will need to happen after LaTeX has finished typesetting and the final PDF file has been fully output—so where do you put the command(s) to do the conversion? The answer is to use a so-called
latexmkrc
file which you can very easily create and add to your Overleaf project.How Overleaf compiles LaTeX:
latexmk
Oveleaf’s automatic compilation of LaTeX is powered by a large Perl script called latexmk which is widely used to automate the processes involved in LaTeX-based typesetting.
latexmk
provides a facility for users to customize/modify its behaviour through a local configuration file called latexmkrc: a simple text file that you create and add to your Overleaf project. Interested readers may like to know that we’ve published a number of articles showing how to use latexmk on Oveleaf’s servers; for example:- How does Overleaf compile my project?
- Examples, techniques and tips on how to use latexmkrc with Overleaf
Because
latexmk
is a Perl program, alatexmkrc
file is, in effect, a small Perl script—but don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Perl programming because our examplelatexmkrc
contains just a single line and we produced the following video to show you how to create alatexmkrc
file within your Overleaf project:
Note: there is no voiceover/sound in that YouTube video.
Somes notes on the conversion
The
latexmkrc
we have used contains the single line:END { system('convert -density 600 -background white -flatten output.pdf pages.png'); }
This uses a Perl function called
system(...)
to execute a program calledconvert
—which does the actual conversion. The command we have used will rasterize the the PDF file (output.pdf
) at 600 dpi (using-density 600
), outputting a PNG file calledpages.png
. Note that in addition to PNGconvert
can generate images in other graphics formats including JPEG. The meaning of the-density
option is documented in ImageMagick’s online help.Example image
Here is an example PNG graphic produced using the above command—for clarity, the black border was added by CSS and is not present in the converted image itself:
Note that the
convert
program has a -trim option that you can use to remove white space surrounding the typeset text.Choosing a particular page in your PDF
If you want to generate a PNG file from a particular page in your PDF you can do that by putting the desired page number in square brackets
[...]
after the PDF file name. For example:END { system('convert -density 600 -background white -flatten output.pdf[1] page2.png'); }
will output the second page of
output.pdf
as a PNG file calledpage2.png
—theconvert
program uses zero-based page numbers and refers to page 1 of your PDF (output.pdf
) usingoutput.pdf[0]
; page 2 isoutput.pdf[1]
and so forth.convert
is a very powerful graphics-processing utility and is part of the ImageMagick toolset—it has a wealth of command line options and interested readers are encouraged to explore its capabilities.