PDF to JPG converter

Rasterizing a page: from vectors to pixels

A PDF page is mostly a set of drawing instructions — place this glyph here, stroke this vector there, paint this image into that rectangle. An image file has none of that structure; it is just a grid of pixels. So converting a page to JPG or PNG means rasterizing it: the pdf.js engine executes the page's drawing instructions onto a canvas at a chosen size, then reads the canvas back out as a bitmap. The trade-off is that everything collapses into pixels. The crisp, infinitely-scalable text and vectors of the original become a fixed-resolution picture — no longer selectable, searchable, or reflowable. That is exactly what you want for embedding or previewing, and exactly what you do not want if you still need to edit the words.

Resolution and format: choosing DPI, JPG vs. PNG

The Quality control sets a render scale, which maps to an effective resolution: a PDF point is 1/72 inch, so a scale of 1.5 gives ~108 DPI (fine for screens), 2 gives ~144 DPI, and 3 gives ~216 DPI (sharp enough to print or zoom into). Higher DPI means a sharper but heavier image and more memory used while rendering. Format matters too. JPG uses lossy compression that is excellent for photographic or colour-rich pages and keeps files small for email and the web. PNG is lossless and supports transparency, so it is the better pick for line art, screenshots, diagrams, or any page with sharp text edges where JPG's compression would leave faint halos.

A one-way street — and the road back

Rasterizing is not reversible: once a page is an image, the text layer is gone, so re-embedding it in a PDF gives you a picture of words, not editable words. If you may need to edit later, keep the original PDF and only export images for the specific use at hand. Every page here renders with its own download button, so you can grab a single page or use Download all. To assemble images back into a PDF, use the image to PDF tool; to shrink a bulky PDF without turning it into pictures, use compress PDF; and to pull out just the pages you want first, use split PDF. The whole conversion runs locally — your document is never uploaded.