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I've seen various methods for generating thumbnails of PDF files in .NET, but unfortunately all of them require full version of Acrobat installed. Is there a way for getting them with free Adobe Reader or any other way?

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3 Answers

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I find Ghostscript to be just great, and it's free! For Windows, it comes as just a simple .dll and .exe, which you can programmatically launch from C#.

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You need a PDF to TIFF or JPEG or BMP conversion. Using a commercial library allow you to many other things with your PDF's.

You could try either of these commercial approaches

http://www.informatik.com/tiff2pdf.html or http://www.quickpdflibrary.com/ or
http://www.expert-tools.com/ENGLISH/index.html or http://www.amyuni.com/en/developer/pdfcreator/features.html

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The only way I know is to load .pdf into readers' hidden ActiveX and then make screenshoots of reader's control. It look weird (and it is weird) -- but it works.

P.S. Or use third-part components.

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