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I need to get the thumbnails from arbitrary file types. (Or as many as I can.)

For image like file types I can use image-magick for it. For document like files I am thinking I would use:

Document -> (Open office with Pyuno) PDF -> (Image-magick) Pdf to images. -> Thumbnail of first page.

  1. Is there a better way to do this?
  2. Is there a web service which can do this?
shabda
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1 Answers1

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Yes, I think you got it right. Of course there are some web services out there though I don't have experience using these so I won't list any here.

Creating a thumbnail of a document requires rendering and office documents like docx are so complex that only very few libraries/applications can render them. LibreOffice seems to be the best bet in that area.

Thankfully there is already a Python script out there which provides a command-line front-end for conversion using LibreOffice/OpenOffice: unoconv. It should be able to use all the export filters present in the office suite (including png and pdf).

I noticed some problems exporting directly to png but pdf exports were mostly fine.

Btw: If you have problems with imagemagick you might want to try ghostscript.

Felix Schwarz
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