ramblings of a feline simian
Creating a thumbnail of a PDF with LAMP
Fairly simple if you have ghostscript, imagemagik for php installed.
<?php
$im = new imagick('file.pdf[0]'); // open the first page
$im->getNumberImages(); // get number of pages
$im->setResolution( 300, 300 );
$im->setImageFormat( "jpg" );
header( "Content-Type: image/jpeg" );
echo $im;
?>