A ruby command line script to generate jpg's from the first pages of pdf files.

convert_pdf.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# This require that you have ImageMagick and Ghostscript installed and available on your PATH
# It also assumes you have you pdf files in `pdfs` folder
# Note: Since it generates jpg's it does not handle transparency very well
#       modify the .jpg to .png to generate png files.

Dir['pdfs/*.pdf'].each do |pdf_file|
  jpg_file = pdf_file.chomp(File.extname(pdf_file)) + ".jpg"
  system("convert -density 144 #{pdf_file}[0] -resize 200x300 #{jpg_file} ")
end

We could always re-process them, you're right. For now, they need to be high-quality enough to be used wherever our partners might use them, for example:

https://ccafs.cgiar.org/publications/how-countries-plan-address-agricultural-adaptation-and-mitigation

The size of these is more or less ok, but the quality is horrible.