PDF to PNG

Renders each page of a PDF as a PNG image. All pages by default; put a range like 1-3,5 in the page box to convert only those.

When PNG is the right choice: screenshots, text-heavy pages, charts and line art, and anything you will process further — upscaling, cutting out, feeding to OCR. It is lossless, so letter edges stay clean; JPG's lossy pass leaves faint ringing around text that shows up as soon as you zoom in.

The cost is size: the same scanned page as PNG is often three to five times the JPG. A workable rule: JPG to send, PNG to keep and reprocess.

Picking the scale: 1.33 is roughly 96 dpi for on-screen viewing; 2 is roughly 144 dpi and is the default; 3 is roughly 216 dpi for printing, close inspection, or OCR input. Higher scale means slower rendering and more memory.

The output is an image, not a document. Text becomes pixels — no selection, no search, no copy. Use OCR if you need the text.

One counter-intuitive point: the PNG you get does not have a transparent background. A PDF page has no notion of transparency and is painted white when rendered, so the alpha channel buys nothing here — you would have to cut the background out yourself. Worth knowing before you try, since "PNG supports transparency" is the usual assumption.

Large documents use a lot of memory and the page may stall briefly; let it finish. Multiple pages can be downloaded together as a zip.

Rendering happens in your browser; the file is never uploaded.