How to convert PDF files to images

As for 2018 there is still not a simple answer to the question of how to convert a PDF document to an image in C#; many libraries use Ghostscript licensed under AGPL and in most cases an expensive commercial license is required for production use.

A good alternative might be using the popular 'pdftoppm' utility which has a GPL license; it can be used from C# as command line tool executed with System.Diagnostics.Process. Popular tools are well known in the Linux world, but a windows build is also available.

If you don't want to integrate pdftoppm by yourself, you can use my PdfRenderer popular wrapper (supports both classic .NET Framework and .NET Core) - it is not free, but pricing is very affordable.

The thread "converting PDF file to a JPEG image" is suitable for your request.

One solution is to use a third-party library. ImageMagick is a very popular and is freely available too. You can get a .NET wrapper for it here. The original ImageMagick download page is here.

• Convert PDF pages to image files using the Solid Framework Convert PDF pages to image files using the Solid Framework (dead link, the deleted document is available on Internet Archive).
• Convert PDF to JPG Universal Document Converter
• 6 Ways to Convert a PDF to a JPG Image

And you also can take a look at the thread "How to open a page from a pdf file in pictureBox in C#".

If you use this process to convert a PDF to tiff, you can use this class to retrieve the bitmap from TIFF.

public class TiffImage
{
    private string myPath;
    private Guid myGuid;
    private FrameDimension myDimension;
    public ArrayList myImages = new ArrayList();
    private int myPageCount;
    private Bitmap myBMP;

    public TiffImage(string path)
    {
        MemoryStream ms;
        Image myImage;

        myPath = path;
        FileStream fs = new FileStream(myPath, FileMode.Open);
        myImage = Image.FromStream(fs);
        myGuid = myImage.FrameDimensionsList[0];
        myDimension = new FrameDimension(myGuid);
        myPageCount = myImage.GetFrameCount(myDimension);
        for (int i = 0; i < myPageCount; i++)
        {
            ms = new MemoryStream();
            myImage.SelectActiveFrame(myDimension, i);
            myImage.Save(ms, ImageFormat.Bmp);
            myBMP = new Bitmap(ms);
            myImages.Add(myBMP);
            ms.Close();
        }
        fs.Close();
    }
}

Use it like so:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    TiffImage myTiff = new TiffImage("D:\\Some.tif");
    //imageBox is a PictureBox control, and the [] operators pass back
    //the Bitmap stored at that position in the myImages ArrayList in the TiffImage
    this.pictureBox1.Image = (Bitmap)myTiff.myImages[0];
    this.pictureBox2.Image = (Bitmap)myTiff.myImages[1];
    this.pictureBox3.Image = (Bitmap)myTiff.myImages[2];
}

You can use Ghostscript to convert PDF to images.

To use Ghostscript from .NET you can take a look at Ghostscript.NET library (managed wrapper around the Ghostscript library).

To produce image from the PDF by using Ghostscript.NET, take a look at RasterizerSample.

To combine multiple images into the single image, check out this sample: http://www.niteshluharuka.com/2012/08/combine-several-images-to-form-a-single-image-using-c/#