PDF to PNG

Why PNG is usually the right format for a page

This is the whole reason to choose this over converting to JPG, and it is the opposite of the advice you would get for a photograph.

JPEG compression works by discarding detail around sharp edges. That is nearly invisible on a photograph, where edges are soft and irregular — and it is very visible on a page of text, where every letter is a sharp edge. Convert a page to JPG and zoom in and you will see faint grey haze around the characters, thin lines picking up fuzz, and table borders going slightly soft.

PNG is lossless, so a page comes out exactly as it rendered. Text stays crisp, hairlines stay thin, and a diagram's edges stay clean. The file is larger — that is the trade — but for a page you are going to put in a slide, a document or a website, the sharpness is worth more than the kilobytes.

The exception is a page that is mostly a photograph — a full-bleed image spread, a photo-heavy brochure. There JPEG's argument applies again and the file will be far smaller for no visible loss.

Which resolution to pick

Standard is right for anything viewed on a screen: an image in a slide deck, a page embedded in a web page or a document, a preview. It is legible and the files stay manageable.

High is for when the image will be zoomed into, printed at normal size, or looked at closely — a page going into a report where someone needs to read the small print, or a figure being cropped out of the page.

Ultra is for print at size, or for pages containing small text and fine detail that has to survive being enlarged. Be aware of what you are asking for: each step up multiplies the pixel count, so an Ultra render of a multi-page document produces very large files and takes a while, and every page is being drawn at that size before it is encoded. Pick it deliberately rather than by default.

Sensible approach: convert one page at Standard, look at it at the size you will actually use, and step up only if it is not enough.

The background is transparent — which cuts both ways

Worth knowing before you use the result, because it surprises people.

Most PDFs do not actually paint a white background; the page is white because a viewer draws it white behind the content. These PNGs are rendered without that assumption, so wherever the PDF paints nothing, the PNG is transparent rather than white.

That is genuinely useful when you are compositing. Drop the page onto a coloured slide and the background shows through; the text sits on your colour instead of inside a white rectangle. For diagrams and logos pulled out of a document it is exactly what you want.

It is unhelpful when you expected a picture of a page. Some viewers show transparency as a checkerboard, some as black, and text that was black on transparent can be invisible against a dark background. If you want a solid white page, place the PNG on a white background in whatever you are using it in, or convert to JPG instead — JPEG has no transparency, so the background is filled in for you.

Page ranges

Leave the field empty for the whole document, or give a range. 1-3,5 converts the first three pages and the fifth; duplicates are removed and the order is sorted, so a messy entry still behaves.

Useful because the common case is not the whole document — it is one page. A single figure, the signature page, the diagram on page eleven. Converting all ninety pages to get one is a lot of waiting and a lot of ZIP to dig through.

Related tools

PDF to JPG does the same job as JPG, which is the better choice for photo-heavy pages and when file size matters more than crispness. Extract Images from PDF is a different thing again — it pulls the embedded photographs out of the PDF rather than rendering the page — and Compress Image reduces the finished PNGs if they are larger than you need.