PDF to JPG
The right answer for a scan, the wrong one for text
…
- 1
Work out what your pages are
A scanned document, a photo brochure or a poster is a photograph as far as any encoder is concerned, and JPG was built for exactly that. A contract, a statement or a slide deck is words on white, and JPG is the wrong tool for it.
- 2
Why the format decides the file size
JPG is usually a fraction of the PNG of the same page, because it is allowed to approximate. On a photograph you will not see where it did. Around the edge of a letter you will, as a faint grey haze that was not in the document.
- 3
Then pick a scale
The pixel size is shown as you change it, so you can see what you are asking for before the first page is drawn.
FAQ
- JPG or PNG?
- JPG for scans, photographs and anything printed in colour. PNG for text, tables, line drawings, screenshots and anything you plan to run text recognition on. There is a PNG page here and it costs the same as this one, which is nothing.
- Why does the text look fuzzy?
- That is JPG doing what JPG does. It approximates fine detail, and the sharpest detail on a page of words is the edge of every letter. Raising the scale helps a little; switching to PNG fixes it.
- Are these small enough to email?
- Usually, and that is the reason to pick JPG. A scanned page as JPG is commonly several times smaller than the same page as PNG, which is what gets a long document under an attachment limit.
- Is my PDF uploaded?
- No. The rendering happens in your browser and no request carries the document. Watch the network panel while it runs.
- Will white pages come out white?
- Yes. A PDF page is transparent wherever nothing is drawn, and JPG cannot carry transparency, so the empty parts are filled with the white a printed page would have rather than the black some encoders default to.
- Is there a page limit?
- No. Pages are drawn and handed over one at a time, so memory does not grow with the length of the document and you do not wait for the last page to get the first.