PDF to PNG

How to use PDF to PNG

Key features of PDF to PNG

About PDF to PNG

PDF to PNG draws each page onto a canvas with pdf.js at scale 2, about 144 DPI, and exports the canvas as a PNG. An A4 page comes out around 1190 by 1684 pixels. JSZip bundles the images into one archive. Every page is converted; there is no page range or size setting.

PNG is the right choice when the page holds line art, diagrams, screenshots or small text, because nothing is smoothed away, and when you plan to edit the image afterwards. It converts whole pages, not the pictures inside them, and a scanned page is re-rendered at the new size. For smaller files where some softening is acceptable, use PDF to JPG.

When to use PDF to PNG

You are writing documentation and need a figure that lives in a PDF: a flowchart from a specification, a wiring diagram from a manual, a chart from a report. Convert the PDF, take the page you need from the ZIP and crop the figure in an image editor. Because the PNG is lossless, the thin connector lines and small labels come through exactly as rendered.

A form, statement or ticket needs to be kept as a picture of what it looked like on a given day, for example to attach to a support case. A PNG of the page is a fixed record that cannot be reflowed, and the file name tells you which page it was. If what you need is to find what changed between two versions, Compare PDF does a word-by-word comparison instead.

A colleague's slide deck was exported to PDF and you want to reuse one slide as an image on a web page or in a chat. The page comes out at twice its nominal size on a white background, ready to insert. If you need the whole deck back in PowerPoint, PDF to PPT places every page on a slide in one step.

PNG is a poor fit for a scanned photo album or a brochure made of large photographs: PNG does not compress photographic detail well, so the ZIP gets big. PDF to JPG gives smaller files from those pages. And if the reason for converting is to read a scanned page's text, OCR PDF gives you a searchable PDF instead of pictures.

Tips and troubleshooting

• A file over 150 MB is refused with a message under the drop zone and nothing is converted. Trim the document with Extract Pages and convert the smaller file.
• Conversion failed: No password given means the PDF is protected with an open password. This tool has no password field; remove the protection first and convert the copy. Files with only printing or copying restrictions open normally.
• Conversion failed: Invalid PDF structure appears when the dropped file is not a PDF, which can happen because drag and drop skips the .pdf filter that the file picker applies.
• The PNGs are opaque. pdf.js fills the canvas with white before drawing the page, so there is no transparency, even on a page that has no background of its own.
• Files are numbered page_1.png to page_N.png without leading zeros. Anything that sorts them alphabetically puts page_10, page_11 and so on before page_2; sort by the number instead.
• A page that carries a rotation attribute comes out the way a viewer displays it, so a landscape page stored sideways does not need turning afterwards. To fix pages that were scanned upside down or on their side, run Rotate PDF first.
• PNG files are larger than JPGs of the same pages, and every one of them stays in memory until the ZIP is generated. A long PDF can make the tab sluggish; if it stops with an error, convert it in parts. The result has no Preview Document button, since a ZIP cannot be previewed; unzip it to check the pages.
• The guide PDF to JPG or PNG: which one to choose compares the formats with measured sizes: for photos and scans, PNG came out three to four times larger than JPG.

How PDF to PNG works in your browser

The script reads your file with the File API into a Uint8Array and passes it to pdf.js, whose worker (loaded from cdnjs.cloudflare.com) parses the document and reports the page count. Each page is asked for a viewport at scale 2, a canvas is created at that pixel size, and page.render draws the page onto it: text, vector graphics and embedded images alike. toDataURL with image/png then encodes the canvas losslessly, and the base64 data is handed to JSZip, which decodes it back to bytes and stores it as page_N.png. One canvas exists at a time; the encoded images accumulate in the archive object.

After the last page, generateAsync turns the archive into a Blob and the result card appears with the name of your PDF plus _png.zip and the size. Download File makes a temporary object URL for the Blob and triggers a save through a hidden link. Nothing about your file is transmitted: the page fetches only its own assets, the pdf.js and JSZip libraries and Google Analytics (only while it is switched on), and the PDF bytes, canvases and ZIP live in the tab's memory until you leave the page.

Frequently asked questions