Practical use cases

  • Dropping a page of a PDF into a slide deck or a design tool.
  • Sharing a page somewhere that accepts images but not PDFs.
  • Keeping sharp text and diagrams from a page as an image.

What changes in the conversion

The result is a picture of each page: text, links and form fields become pixels and can no longer be selected or searched. PNG files are usually larger than JPG files of the same page.

Common problems

  • You expected one file and got a .zip: that only happens for multi-page documents; a single-page PDF downloads its PNG directly.
  • The ZIP could not be built: if the ZIP library cannot load, every page is downloaded as an individual PNG instead.
  • The files are large: PNG is lossless. If size matters more than perfect edges, use PDF to JPG.