Great! Keep in mind that the code I wrote is both hacky and specific to
our collection; my intent was to throw my ideas out there, either for
someone else's collection, or for abstraction into the libraries. Going
by the book, I should have tried troubleshooting the Ghostscript
problem, but I didn't bother since I don't need to run 'convert' and
preferred my approach over trying to navigate the plugin inheritance
hierarchy (which I as an outsider find rather daunting) to disable the
GS features.

> The recently released Release Candidate for Greenstone 2.84 uses
> "PDFbox" (which is to be downloaded as an extension) to try to obtain
> better conversions from PDF.

I'll have a look. Thank you!

--
Yitzchak Schaffer