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7

Looking for a free way to convert a PDF document to an image.

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I asked a similar question last year on Stack Overflow. You can read the answers there. – stevenvh Sep 8 '10 at 7:13

7 Answers

up vote 23 down vote accepted

This is overkill for what you need, but in the absence of another answer, GIMP can do this for you. Just install it, open the PDF, and save-as a PNG.

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No more overkill than the 5 or so 'free' programs I installed that left a watermark on the image. Worked beautifully, thanks! – Raymond Sep 8 '10 at 1:00
This is exactly what I needed. I wanted to convert a PDF to a high-resolution PNG file, and using GIMP worked really great! – Mas Sep 6 '11 at 19:27
Thanks, have tried several tools, either with watermarks or other limitations. GIMP works fine. – Horst Walter Oct 22 '11 at 0:08
Gimp works great for a single page, but I don't see a simple way to export lots of pages automatically. I'm sure if you know gimp well you could use automation tools to get it working. But perhaps pdftoppm is better. – chrishiestand Mar 5 at 23:07
@chrishiestand, You should post that as an alternative answer. – Brad Mar 6 at 0:21
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up vote 19 down vote

If you have imagemagick installed, you can just type:

convert myfile.pdf myfile.png

Though personally I prefer the results obtained from pdftoppm from Poppler utilities:

pdftoppm -png myfile.pdf > myfile.png

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on mac with homebrew I had to install imagemagick and ghostscript for this to work. brew install imagemagick brew install ghostscript – Andreas Feb 20 '12 at 16:01
+1 for pdftoppm: good results and fast. – Olivier 'Ölbaum' Scherler Oct 24 '12 at 12:42
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Why do you prefer the results of pdftoppm? I notice that the default output resolution is higher than imagemagick (although this can be changed), but apart from that they seem comparable on my test file. – Sparhawk Feb 14 at 4:22
Poppler does a much better job for me - I've got an input pdf with CYMK colours, with imagemagick the colours come out a crazy bright cyan. Also convert takes ~8 seconds and pdftoppm takes less than 0.5 seconds. Thanks for the pointer! – maxpenguin Mar 8 at 2:38
up vote 8 down vote

Windows: Install PDFCreator and open your PDF. Print it to the PDFCreator printer (or whatever you called it) and hit save. When you hit save, after choosing a filename, set the filetype to PNG.

Linux: Install ImageMagick (on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install imagemagick) and then in a terminal type: convert [Input PDF File.pdf] [Output PNG File.png].

Mac OS X: Open the PDF in Preview and in the Save As dialog, set the filetype to png.

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up vote 2 down vote

Which OS do you use?

On a Mac, it's as simple as opening the PDF in the Preview app and saving it as a PNG.

On http://www.zamzar.com/, you can convert many file types for free also.

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up vote 2 down vote

If using Windows, I would use Bullzip PDF Printer, simply choose print and then select .PNG as the file type.

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up vote 1 down vote

The docupub online tool works quite well, you get an image per page: http://docupub.com/pdfconvert/

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up vote -1 down vote

Try Saaspose.PDF API, it can convert your pdf file to many other image formats for free.

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Since this is on Super User, I think Raymond is looking for software, not an API. – Louis Nov 2 '12 at 6:45

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