This morning, I wanted to post that I was ranked #4 in Communication Skills on LinkedIn by Favikon. The nice graphic (featuring friends like Georgina Chang, David Lian, Ruth Lee, Geraldine Kan) was in a PDF and I wanted to extract that page as an image for posting. I ended up getting Gen AI to code an app.
This is what happened:
🔴 I went to Adobe.com and it demanded $27 a month for Acrobat Pro. NO!
🔴 I tried other free online PDF to JPG converters and they wouldn’t take this large PDF with 47 pages and 48MB in size. ARGH.
🔴 I searched Reddit and then GitHub for free solutions but they were all too complicated.
🔴 Canva does the conversion well and for free (YAY!) but I wondered if I could do the conversion locally.
🔷 I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini to code an app for me, and Gemini provided the best solution with a small HTML file that I could easily customise. I renamed the app to “Ian’s PDF to JPG Converter” and changed the typeface to Reddit Sans from Google Fonts. IT WORKS!
⭐ You can use my app too!
- Here’s the link to the app.
- You can paste the code into a text file and rename it to something like “Hello.html” on your computer and use it locally.
- You can also paste the HTML code into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and get them to customise it for you.
Yes, yes, I could have just used Canva and saved myself all the trouble. However, I want my LinkedIn posts to be useful to other people and not just say “Hey I got a nice ranking”. Now you and I both have a free app to do something useful with our PDFs!