How to display attached PDF's as thumbnails?

[joshfrantz]

I am a new, very green user of vbulletin. The primary function of my site is to share .pdf (and other extensions, even .doc, etc) files between users. I would like the users to be able to view the pdf files without having to download them. All the admincp thumbnail settings are on. Attached image files, such as jpegs, can be seen now, just not pdf's. Can you help?

[nexialys]

there is no possibility to do this in the actual structure. you would need:

1- PDF import in PHP/html >> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/
2- a product that read the .pdf file each time you upload one, and generate the thumbnail
3- set the .pdf to show thumbnail in the Attachment Manager

... same if you want to display the .pdf content in a page.

[Cryo]

I don't know if this is even possible, or not without a lot of coding. I searched around Google a little bit and was unable to find any web-based PDF to thumbnail converter.

[joshfrantz]

Thanks for the help! What do I do with the sourceforge file (pdftohtml-0.40a.tar) once I have downloaded it? Is it a plug-in?

[nexialys]

it's not a plugin, it's an engine, i gave you that link as an example of what exists already... it's not something you can intall on vbulletin... a coder would need it to create a product that read the pdf and generate the thumbnails...

usually, when you create a .pdf file, you can check to generate a thumbnail with it, depending on the format you use... if you have Acrobat, it does it by default. (if you have 300$ for it)... but that thumbnail is inserted in the .pdf, it's not seperate, so you always need to read the .pdf to have the thumbnail.