Imagick library

Hello,

Could you please be more specific about what “the thumbnail generator from WP itself” means?

As far as I know, it’s always the GD or Imagick library. Feel free to give me a link to some resources about the topic you’re referring to. I’ll look into it.

Have a nice day!
Jakub

I don’t think that GD can even read PDF… it’s only for image processing from image files, so probably only Imagick can process PDFs, but that’s a standard library, nothing special, I have it on hostings that cost 1€/month.

But wait, you’re saying that you never had problems with PDF thumbnails? So you used some other plugins to do that? Can you give me the plugin name? Because there are some extra libraries that you can use in PHP and tricky ways how to process PDFs, but it’s much more complicated and you would need to include many dependencies, so the plugin would be much bigger, etc… If you are interested in such a solution, you can reach me by the email and we can discuss some custom solution created only for you, but that’s not something I would develop and offer here as a free plugin…

There are also some paid plugins that offer processing on their server, so plugin will send your PDF to their server and it will respond with thumbnail, but that’s of course resources expensive if it’s used by thousand of websites, so that’s why it’s paid then…

Hmm, yes, if you don’t want to pay for services that will generate that thumbnail on their server, which means also sending your data to them and that can be also some legal problem sometimes, then I guess you need that Imagick…

There are also some SSH commands that can generate PDF thumbs, so theoretically if your server allow you tu run exec function with PHP, then also this could work, but it also depends what libraries are there, because if you don’t have Imagick, then maybe you don’t have others too… I think it mostly use Ghostscript and Poppler so if you have these, then maybe it would be possible also that way…