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I'm planning to use MetaUML to automatically generate UML diagrams (as images) and display them.

I found that there is an utility, mptopdf, that helps generating the output as a PDF file:

mptopdf example.mp

Is there any way that I can generate the output as an image file (png/jpg, or any format)? Please suggest. Am entirely new to this.

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If you have ImageMagick installed, you can easily convert the pdf to any other image format:

convert -trim +repage example.pdf example.png

You can replace .png by any other supported format. The -trim +repage option removes unnecessary whitespace surrounding the image and sets the canvas size to the trimmed image. You can also add -density 300 (or any other number) to specify the dpi of the resulting raster image. For example,

convert -density 600 -trim +repage example.pdf -resize 200% example.png
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  • This is wonderful! With IM I can even scale up the image size. Thanks! However, I'll be using this in context of a web application. I was wondering if the output image could be generated "directly". Becasue, creating a PDF and then converting it requires both time and space. – Barun Jan 17 '11 at 5:43
  • I have never used MetaUML, so I can't tell. Compiling the metapost to ps instead of pdf and converting from there might be a bit faster (be sure to do some real world test). But basically I think this is the process that is usually used to get an image file out of TeX code. – Caramdir Jan 17 '11 at 6:15
  • In case someone was as clueless as I was on where to put -density and -resize, it's convert -density 600 -trim +repage example.pdf -resize 200% example.png. Higher sampling density makes the output picture sharper, which is needed when resize up. – Apiwat Chantawibul Jan 2 '14 at 7:49

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