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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T12:31:47+00:00

I am trying to convert a PDF to a JPG with a PHP exec()

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I am trying to convert a PDF to a JPG with a PHP exec() call, which looks like this:

convert page.pdf -resize 716x716 page.jpg

For some reason, the JPG comes out with janky text, despite the PDF looking just fine in Acrobat and Mac Preview. Here is the original PDF:

http://whit.info/dev/conversion/page.pdf

and here is the janktastic output:

http://whit.info/dev/conversion/page.jpg

The server is a LAMP stack with PHP 5 and ImageMagick 6.2.8.

Can you help this stumped Geek?

Thanks in advance,

Whit

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ImageMagick is just going to call out to Ghostscript to convert this PDF to an image. If you run gs on the pdf, you get the same badly-spaced output.

    I suspect Ghostscript isn’t handling the PDF’s embedded TrueType fonts very well. If you could change your output to either embed Type 1 fonts or use a “core” PostScript font, you’d get better results.

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