PDF thumbnails

slowkow

Many users would be interested in seeing a preview (or thumbnail) of each PDF file.

There is a Javascript (client-side) solution for displaying the first page of each PDF file with the pdf.js library:
https://github.com/scandel/pdfThumbnails

Karl

This is an interesting feature, although I have some concerns:

Most PDF's are primarily text, and when you create a small preview for Files app thumbnails layout, it will just be a tiny image with blurry, mostly unreadable text. This doesn't seem useful, unless the PDF has an image cover.
It's slow. Basically this library requires loading the entire PDF files into the browser, just to create a preview. So if you have a folder of 100 PDF's, as user scrolls, it will have to load all the PDF's into browser just to create previews. Furthermore, we can't "cache" the previews, because they are created in the browser (unlike resized images, which are created and cached on the server).
I think the best option is to try to create PDF thumbnails on server with ImageMagick, which means we can cache them also. ImageMagick is not available on all shared servers, but usually available (or can easily be installed) on virtual and self-hosted servers. Ref. Convert PDF to preview image in PHP.

kuzmandi

The basic layout and color of a company logo are usually enough to mentally locate the file (faster than reading a long filename).

I think it would be very helpful if PDF files had a thumbnail.

Karl

kuzmandi The basic layout and color of a company logo are usually enough to mentally locate the file (faster than reading a long filename).

Depends on your PDF's, but we are talking about a thumbnail perhaps 160x160 px (on average). Unless the logo happens to cover a large area on the front page, it would be a tiny colored blip. I have seen PDF thumbnails myself, and for typical text documents (which is what PDF is for), I found it useless and annoying ... It might be different for you if you do actually have large logo-like graphics, but for text-only definitely not ...

As noted in my previous post, this can only be achieved by having your own server with exec() function available and ImageMagick installed ... It's not possible with PHP-only.