PDF to JPG

How PDF pages are rendered as images

The conversion uses PDF.js to parse your PDF and render each page onto an HTML Canvas element. Canvas rendering works by rasterising — converting the PDF's vector drawing commands and fonts into a grid of pixels at a chosen resolution. This tool renders at 2× the screen's device pixel ratio, which produces sharp output on both standard and high-DPI (Retina) displays.

Once a page is on the canvas, the browser's built-in canvas.toBlob() API encodes the pixel data as JPEG at your chosen quality setting. For multi-page PDFs, each page is rendered sequentially and collected into a ZIP archive using JSZip before download.

JPG versus PNG: choosing the right format for PDF pages

JPG is a lossy format that excels at photographic and mixed-content pages — articles, reports, and presentations — where small compression artefacts are invisible. A high-quality JPG of a document page is typically 5–10× smaller than the equivalent PNG.

PNG is lossless and is better suited when the page contains fine text, technical diagrams, or sharp edges where JPG's block compression artefacts would be visible. If you need to convert PDF pages for editing in an image editor or for OCR, PNG preserves more detail. For sharing, embedding in presentations, or posting online, JPG is almost always the right choice.

For this tool, JPG is the default because document pages are the primary use case. If you need PNG output, use the SVG Converter or screenshot the rendered preview at native resolution.

Common reasons for poor image quality and how to fix them

The most common cause of blurry output is a low-resolution source PDF. If the original PDF was created at 72 DPI (screen resolution) or was itself generated from low-resolution images, rendering at 2× will not recover detail that was never there.

If text looks pixelated in the JPG, reduce the JPEG quality setting slightly — counterintuitively, very high JPEG quality can introduce ringing artefacts around high-contrast text edges. A setting of 85–90% typically produces the sharpest text with the fewest artefacts.

For PDFs that use non-standard fonts or complex transparency effects, some pages may render incorrectly because PDF.js does not support every PDF feature. In those cases, printing the PDF to a new PDF using your operating system's built-in PDF printer often produces a more compatible file before conversion.