PDF to JPG

A PDF has no pixels: it is a description of marks on a page, and rendering it means deciding how finely to draw them.

72 DPI gives an A4 page at about 595 × 842 pixels — a usable thumbnail, soft at full size.

150 DPI gives about 1240 × 1754. Sharp on any screen, and the right default.

300 DPI gives about 2480 × 3508 — print resolution, and roughly four times the file size of 150.

600 DPI is for archival reproduction and produces very large files. An A4 page becomes about 5000 × 7000 pixels, which is near the limit of what a browser canvas can hold.

Every page becomes a picture. The text in it is no longer text: it cannot be selected, searched, copied or read by a screen reader, and it will not reflow.

That is the point when you need an image — for a slide, a forum post, a system that only takes images. It is a real loss when what you wanted was the words, and in that case the PDF to Text tool is what you want instead.

JPEG also has no transparency, so each page is painted onto white first. Without that step every page would come out with a black background, which is what an empty canvas is.

A one-page PDF downloads as a single JPEG. A longer document produces one image per page, offered as a ZIP with every page also listed individually so you can take just the one you need. Files are numbered with leading zeros so they sort correctly — report-01.jpg, not report-1.jpg.

Use the page range to convert only part of a long document; there is no reason to render four hundred pages to get page seven.

There are two entirely different things called a PDF.

A born-digital PDF was made by software — exported from Word, generated by a report tool, printed to PDF. It contains real text with real font information, and it converts cleanly in every direction.

A scanned PDF is a photograph of a piece of paper wrapped in a PDF container. There is no text in it at all — only an image — regardless of how clearly you can read it on screen.

The difference decides what is possible. Rasterising works identically on both. Extracting text works only on the first, and a scan yields nothing at all — which is reported plainly rather than handing back an empty file.

If the PDF needs a password to open, enter it in the options. It is used to decrypt the document here in the tab and is never transmitted.

This is one of the clearest cases for a local converter. Uploading an encrypted document together with its password to a stranger's server hands over both the lock and the key, and the documents that carry passwords are the ones where that matters most.