When I use the following ghostscript command to generate jpg thumbnails from PDFs, the image quality is often very poor:
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=jpeggray -g465x600 -dUseCropBox -dPDFFitPage -sOutputFile=pdf_to_lowres.jpg test.pdf
By contrast, if I use ghostscript to generate a high-resolution png, and then use mogrify to convert the high-res png to a low-res jpg, I get pretty good results.
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pnggray -g2550x3300 -dUseCropBox -dPDFFitPage -sOutputFile=pdf_to_highres.png test.pdf
mogrify -thumbnail 465x600 -format jpg -write pdf_to_highres_to_lowres.jpg pdf_to_highres.png
Is there any way to achieve good results while bypassing the intermediate pdf -> high-res png step? I need to do this for a large number of pdfs, so I'm trying to minimize the compute time.
Here are links to the images referenced above: