> I have a huge amount of documents in PDF format (zSeries
> Linux related) that
> I need to make available for reference,
> I am hoping to find a solution (Linux would be nice) that
> would scan/present
> the first page of each of the PDF's,

Would the ability to index the documents, search for a phrase, and then
click on the document in a list returned instead of the thumbnail
approach be acceptable? If so, check out the Drupal content management
system (www.drupal.org), and the Swish-E Indexer (www.swish-e.org)
plugin module. This gives you a easy way to maintain the library (via
the Drupal file upload capability, which can be safely delegated to
someone else), index documents in lots of different formats, and present
a easy search method to search and view them.

This solution works on plain text, e-mail, PDF, HTML, XML, Microsoft
Word/PowerPoint/Excel and just about any file that can be converted to
XML or HTML text (ie IBM Bookmaster documents processed with B2H).

If you really needed the thumbnails, you could use a script that looped
through the files and used Ghostscript to render the 1st page of each
PDF document to a GIF/JPG, then used a slightly modified version of the
Drupal gallery module to present the images with a link to the full
document.

We've used variations of both techniques on www.sinenomine.net, if you'd
like to get an idea of what can be done. Both are known to work
acceptably on Linux on 390.

-- db

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