📄 PDF to JPG Converter
Turn PDF pages into JPG, PNG or WebP at a resolution you choose, with the output pixel size shown before you convert. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Choose a PDF, or drop it here
Rendered in this tab. The document is never uploaded.
What PDF to JPG Converter Does
A PDF page has no pixels. It is a list of drawing instructions — move here, set this font, stroke this curve — in a coordinate space measured in points, 72 to the inch. Turning one into an image means executing those instructions onto a grid, and that grid has to be given a size. This is why every PDF-to-image tool must pick a resolution, and why hiding that choice behind "low, medium, high" is the category’s standard failure.
The number that matters is DPI. At the PDF’s own scale of 72 DPI a US Letter page renders 612 by 792 pixels, which is a thumbnail. At 150 DPI it is 1275 by 1650 and reads comfortably on screen. At 300 DPI it is 2550 by 3300 and matches print. This tool shows the exact pixel size your document will produce before you convert, because a DPI figure means nothing until you know what it makes.
Rendering is done by pdf.js, Mozilla’s renderer — the same engine that displays PDFs inside Firefox — running in your own browser. Its character maps and the fourteen standard PDF fonts are served alongside it. That detail matters more than it sounds: without the character maps, a document using a multi-byte encoding such as Japanese, Chinese or Korean renders with blank or wrong glyphs, and without the standard fonts, text that references Helvetica or Times without embedding them does not draw at all. Both failures look like a broken PDF rather than a broken tool.
What you get back is a picture of each page. The text becomes pixels: no longer selectable, searchable or copyable. That is inherent to the conversion, not a shortcoming of any particular tool, and if you need pages that are still PDFs the splitter is the right answer instead.
How to Use PDF to JPG Converter
- Add a PDF, or drop it onto the box
- Choose which pages, as ranges such as "1-3, 7, 10-"
- Set the resolution and check the output pixel size shown underneath
- Choose JPG, PNG or WebP, convert, and save individually or as one ZIP
Formula Used by PDF to JPG Converter
Output pixel size from page size and DPI
pixels = points × (DPI ÷ 72)
- points
- the page size in PDF user space units, 72 to the inch
- DPI ÷ 72
- the render scale — 1 at 72 DPI, 2 at 144, 4.167 at 300
Worked example
A US Letter page (612 × 792 pt) rendered at 300 DPI.
- Scale: 300 ÷ 72 = 4.1667
- 612 × 4.1667 = 2550
- 792 × 4.1667 = 3300
Result: 2550 × 3300 pixels — 8.4 megapixels for a single page, which is why a 50-page document at 300 DPI is a slow, large job.
What each DPI actually produces
The same two pages at four common settings. Choose by where the image is going, not by the word "high".
| DPI | US Letter (612 × 792 pt) | A4 (595.28 × 841.89 pt) | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 72 | 612 × 792 | 595 × 842 | Thumbnails and previews only |
| 150 | 1275 × 1650 | 1240 × 1754 | Reading on screen, email, slides |
| 200 | 1700 × 2200 | 1654 × 2339 | Screen reading with room to zoom |
| 300 | 2550 × 3300 | 2480 × 3508 | Printing, archiving, OCR elsewhere |
JPG, PNG or WebP for a rendered page
| Page content | Best format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Scanned photographs or a photo-heavy report | JPG | Far smaller; the loss is invisible on continuous tone |
| Mostly text | PNG | Character edges stay perfectly crisp; JPG haloes them |
| Charts, diagrams, line art | PNG | Flat colour compresses well and edges stay sharp |
| Anything going on the web | WebP | Smaller than both, and every current browser reads it |
How to Read Your Result
150 DPI is the right default
It is roughly double the PDF’s own scale, which makes text comfortably readable on any modern display without producing files that are awkward to email. Move to 300 only when the image is going to print or into OCR, and to 72 only for thumbnails.
The pixel figure warns you before a slow job
A 50-page document at 400 DPI is 50 pages at roughly 15 megapixels each — that is a long render and a very large ZIP. Seeing the per-page pixel size first is what stops you starting it by accident.
This is the wrong tool for extracting embedded images
Rendering a page produces a picture of the whole page, including text and layout. If you want the original photographs that were placed in the PDF, at their own resolution, that is a different operation and this is not it.
Limitations & Accuracy Notes
- Text becomes pixels: the output is not selectable, searchable or copyable, and no OCR is performed.
- Password-protected documents are refused rather than partially rendered.
- Rendering is done page by page in your browser, so a long document at high DPI is genuinely slow and memory-hungry on a phone.
- Annotations render as they appear in a viewer; there is no option here to exclude them.
- Very unusual or malformed PDFs may render differently from Acrobat. pdf.js is a faithful, widely-used implementation, not a bit-exact clone of Adobe’s.
- Transparency in the page is flattened onto white, because a JPG cannot hold it and a page is opaque in any case.
Frequently Asked Questions
What DPI should I choose?
Why is a PDF page measured in points?
Should I use JPG or PNG?
Can I still select the text afterwards?
Will unusual fonts and non-Latin text render correctly?
Is the document uploaded anywhere?
References & Further Reading
- pdf.js — Mozilla’s PDF renderer — The renderer used here, the same one built into Firefox
- ISO 32000-1 / PDF 32000 specification (Adobe copy) — Default user space unit of 1/72 inch — the basis of the DPI arithmetic above