I have a great many folders of PDFs, mostly grabbed from archive.org magazine_rack, ataribooks, etc. The trouble is when I open a folder of these, Finder makes preview icons for a few of them, then gives up and they all show a generic “PDF” icon. What I want is a persistent icon for the first page!
First, you need osxutils:
% sudo port install osxutils
% man seticon
And my icontool.
sips (Scriptable Image Processing System) is a built-in tool on the Mac, incredibly powerful image converter. I’m not gonna do anything fancy with perspective ratios or padding, just use it to get an image.
Now create pdficonset.zsh:
#!/bin/zsh
export CG_PDF_VERBOSE=1
find . -type f -d -iname "*.pdf" |while read -r f; do
echo $f
sips -s format png $f -o thumb.png && \
icontool.zsh thumb.png thumb.icns && \
seticon -d thumb.icns $f
rm -f thumb.png thumb.icns
done
Run it in the parent directory, and boom! All nice icons.
[update: added a little better error-safety. CG_PDF_VERBOSE just gives better but still not useful error messages.]
I don’t have the problem as bad with CBZ/CBR comics; they’d be trivial to extract the first page from, since they’re just ZIP/BZIP files.
