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You could do a pdf to jpg for each page, then a resize to thumbnail. You'd want to cache the thumbnails, but if your pdfs aren't changing much, there's not too much overhead.

While I realize this is supposed to be an amusing turn of phrase, there are actually quite a few tools out there. A few that I like are:

PDFBox - OSS Library for modifying PDFs on the fly.
FOP - Use XSL-FO to design printable page layouts in XML, then use FOP to transform them to PDF documents.
Foxit Tools - Alternative to the overpriced Adobe products.
OpenOffice - The built-in support for PDFs is absolutely wonderful. I rarely give out DOC files anymore.
FPDF - PHP PDF generation tools.
iText - A great library for your own custom PDF generation.

Those are just a few. The PDF format itself is actually not too bad. (When Adobe isn't breaking it with needless revisions, that is.) It's biggest strength is that the psuedo-text nature of the format allows one to diagnose the internals of a file pretty easily. Its greatest weakness is that things like text fields are needlessly convoluted. At the end of the day, though, it's a pretty good format.

Indeed. Number 1, why is "production" version of PDFBox releasing beta code? AH! Cause it's only at version .7! Any why was the PDFToImage disclaimer on the website but not in the actual JavaDoc API, which is what Java programmers use to understand 3rd party libraries? PDFBox is cute but is NOT ready for PDFImaging in a prime-time way, which is why I moved to ImageMagick and other toolkits.

Indeed. Number 1, why is "production" version of PDFBox releasing beta code? AH! Cause it's only at version .7! Any why was the PDFToImage disclaimer on the website but not in the actual JavaDoc API, which is what Java programmers use to understand 3rd party libraries? PDFBox is cute but is NOT ready for PDFImaging in a prime-time way, which is why I moved to ImageMagick and other toolkits.

Looking at the APIs used by the book, I think he forgot two very important ones:

PDFBox - A library that gives you complete parsing control over PDFs. You can create documents from scratch, extract text, merge pages, change text/images/fields, populate forms, etc. With the use of PDFs in corporate environments on the rise, you just can't go wrong with PDFBox in your toolbox.

POI - Does your company use Office documents in any way, shape, or form? Then you need POI. Create spreadsheets and word documents from scratch, modify existing documents, create spreadsheet computers and reports on the fly. The possibiliies are endless, and your boss with thank you for not having to deaL with ANOTHER CSV file.

FYI, the FDF files are nothing more than a "patch" to the original PDF document. The idea is that you download an FDF, then Acrobat uses it to lookup, display, and prefill the original PDF document. As a result, the FDF only works online or when the user has a local copy of the file.

Those of us in need of a more robust solution use a library like PDFBox to dig through the pseudo-text "Object" structure and fillout the values for the forms. Oh, and we merge all your documents into one nice document structure while we're at it.

The course is an elective, and was offered for the first time last year; not many students decided to take it. Those who did, got hooked; some commented that it was the course where they really understood what it meant to program.

The following projects were completed last year:

• Support for PDF actions in PDFBox.
• Improvements to the GUI interface of the ZGRViewer
• The addition of a new question type in the ETH Lecture Communicator

This year the course will be taught in English and will be offered to students across Europe through the EU's Erasmus student mobility programme. I hope to be able to report on new exciting results through slashdot next year.

I do have to agree with this. I've written quite a few PDF generation, document field prepopultors, and document merging programs. A great API for dealing with the PDF format is PDFBox. Now if we could only get PDF creation programs not to insert invalid garbage into the files...