converting postscript to an image

This is something I've meant to learn how to do for ages. I needed to do this to produce summaries for a shit load of PDFs (containing related molecules) and wanted to have an image of a structure to represent each PDF. Anyway, I print structures as postscript files, so I needed a way to create a PNG of the first structure for each PDF.

I saw a few solutions on line which used ghostview to first output a jpeg and then 'mogrify' to cut down the hunormous result to something useful. It turns out you can just do this:

convert molecule.ps -trim molecule.png

This creates a png from the ps file. Blimey! Really simple!

The -trim tag is a great addition as well, since a direct conversion results in a lot of extra whitespace.