Lossless · nothing is uploaded
PDF to PNG
Export every page as a lossless PNG at the resolution you pick. Rendered in this tab — JPG is available here too.
Selected files
Processing details
Why PNG for a page of a PDF
A PDF page is mostly text, rules and line art — exactly the content JPEG handles worst. JPEG works by discarding detail the eye is unlikely to miss, which is a fair trade on a photograph and a bad one on a letter: it leaves faint halos around every character, and at small sizes those halos are what make exported text look slightly dirty. PNG is lossless. Each page comes out as the renderer drew it, so an exported page of type still has crisp black on clean white.
The trade is size. A 300 DPI PNG of an A4 page holds around 8.7 million pixels and will typically run to several megabytes, where the equivalent JPG might be a few hundred kilobytes. That is the whole decision: fidelity against bytes.
Which resolution to choose
- 72 DPI — a thumbnail or a preview. Roughly 595 × 842 pixels for an A4 page. Body text stops being comfortably readable around here, so use it when the image represents a page rather than being one.
- 150 DPI — the default, and the right answer most of the time. Text is clearly legible on screen and the file stays manageable. This is the setting for pasting a page into a document, an email or a slide.
- 300 DPI — print, or anything that will be zoomed into or re-cropped. Also the setting to use if the PNG is going through OCR afterwards: recognition accuracy falls off sharply below 300 DPI on small type.
Doubling the DPI quadruples the pixel count, so 300 DPI is roughly four times the file size of 150, not twice.
Transparency: what to expect
PNG supports transparency, but a rendered PDF page generally will not use it. A page has a background — usually white — and that background is part of what gets drawn, so the exported PNG arrives with an opaque white page behind the content rather than a transparent one. This is worth knowing before you drop an exported page onto a coloured slide and find a white rectangle around it.
If you need the artwork without the page behind it, the images inside the PDF are a better source than a render of the whole page — Extract images pulls out the embedded originals at their full stored resolution, with any transparency they already had.
One PNG per page
Every page becomes its own image, numbered in order, and a multi-page PDF therefore produces a set of files rather than one. If you only want certain pages, it is usually quicker to extract those pages first and convert the short document, rather than exporting everything and sorting through the output.
Nothing leaves your browser
The rendering happens in this tab, using the same engine your browser already uses to display PDFs. The file is not uploaded, not copied to a server and not queued anywhere — which also means the conversion keeps working with the network disconnected, and that page contents never become someone else's log entry. You can check that claim rather than take it.