GS Only PDF Preview
Uses Ghostscript directly to generate PDF previews.
5(8 reviews)
·2.0K+ active installs·Updated 8 years agoAs of April 2026, GS Only PDF Preview is a WordPress pdf plugin with 2.0K+ active installations and a 5/5 rating from 8 reviews. It has been downloaded 14K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 4.7.0+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2017. Last updated 8 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are up 86% this week. Top alternative: PDF Invoices & Packing Slips for….
5/58 reviews
2.0K+active installs
14K+total downloads
9 yearssince 2017
Overview
The plugin pre-empts the standard WordPress 4.7/4.8 PDF preview production process (which uses the PHP extension Imagick) to call Ghostscript directly to produce the preview.
This means that only Ghostscript is required on the server. Neither the PHP module Imagick nor the server package ImageMagick is needed or used (though it’s fine if they’re installed anyway, and if they are they’ll be used by WP (unless you override it) to produce the intermediate sizes of the preview).
Background
The plugin was prompted by the WP_Image_Editor_Imagick_External demonstration class uploaded to the WP Trac ticket #39262 Fall back to ImageMagick command line when the pecl imagic is not available on the server by Hristo Pandjarov, and by the wish to solve the WP Trac ticket #39216 PDFs w…
Screenshots
Ratings & Reviews
58 reviews
5 ★
8
4 ★
0
3 ★
0
2 ★
0
1 ★
0
Recent Reviews
Works on PHP 7.4, WP 6.2, helpful!
by Marty·2 years ago
Helpful for getting around some modern configuration issues with imagick, php, and some server setups.
Works perfectly on v6
by seseschneider·3 years ago
Works perfectly on v6
works perfectly, automatically generates PDF thumbnail
by Clare Parkinson·4 years ago·4 replies
Sometime in March 2021 my site stopped generating PDF thumbnails automatically. It seems like a bug in WP. I installed this plugin on WP 5.7.1 and now the PDF thumbnails are automatically generated on newly uploaded PDFs. There’s also an option to generate thumbnails of the PDFs that didn’t have them. This seems to be a little glitchy – my site is hosted on Pantheon, and sometimes I saw an error “unable to generate PDF preview”, but after clearing the caches and clicking a few times, I got all my old PDF images regenerated. Great workaround, completely solves my problem.
- This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Clare Parkinson.
Wow, this fixes a WP bug, awesome plugin!
by Exo·5 years ago
AWESOME PLUGIN!
FYI: WP has a bug with PDFs, if you upload a PDF to WordPress that does not have a background (transparent), WP reverts to black. Crazy. There’s a whole discussion about it elsewhere can I could not find a fix for hundreds of PDF’s on a site I had.
This plugin not only fixes that but with 1-click and replaces the dodgy original WP thumbnails!
For those that uploaded PDF’s to older versions of WP before it made thumbnails, annoyingly this plugin shows an error, but ignore it as it still creates new thumbs.
5-star plugin.
It does still work! Thanks :)
by Jordy Meow·5 years ago·1 reply
There is a server on which I can’t install ImageMagick but where there is Ghostscript. Thanks to this plugin, it was possible to generate thumbnails for the PDFs in the Media Library.
The plugin probably needs to be checked, as I got the error “Failed to generate the PDF preview”, even though… it worked 🙂
Download Trends
Today: 2Yesterday: 4This week: 39Period total: 1K
Compatibility
| WordPress | 4.7.0+ requiredTested up to 4.8.0 |
| PHP | false+ required |
Version Adoption
v1.0
100.0%
Top Alternatives to GS Only PDF Preview
Frequently Asked Questions
Changelog
1.0.7 (13 Jun 2017)
- Fix regex for patching “Align” select of Attachment Display Settings after core changeset [40640].
- Rejig tests.
- WP 4.8.0 compatible.
Contributors
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.