No simple way to convert PDF to any image format like jpeg on the fly

[2levelsabove]

Seriously I have been working on this for 2 days and googling everywhere and I still cant get it done. I am trying to make a thumbnail of the first page of the PDF

 

Tried using imagemagick but that is not working too good for me

 

1), using imagemagick PHP API:

 

MagickReadImage($resource,$uploadFile);
MagickSetImageFormat($resource, "PNG");
MagickSetImageFilename($resource,$thumbnailFile);
str_replace(".pdf",".jpg",$thumbnailFile);
MagickWriteImage($resource); 

that just results in a pdf file that is almost

 

 

option 2 via exec()

str_replace(".pdf",".jpg",$thumbnailFile);
exec("/usr/bin/convert '".$uploadFile."' -colorspace RGB -geometry 200 '".$thumbnailFile."'") or die("couldn't convert");

 

 

That dies for me. In essence I seem to be going no where as honestly THERE is almost no documentation to cover that.