Question

I have a PDF that contains a scan image of a document. I want to save the contents of this PDF as an image so that I can then run it through an OCR program that only accepts .jpg, .png, and .gif type files.

How do I save/convert this PDF to one of those image formats?

EDIT: One way I've found to do this is to click on each page. Copy to clipboard. Paste to Paint.net and then save. However, this is cumbersome as it appears you can only select one page at a time in Acrobat Reader.

Answer 1

Use GhostScript. This command works for me:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=png16m -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -r150 -sOutputFile=output%d.png input.pdf

There are multiple png pseudo-devices, differentiating on color depth: pngmono, pnggray, png16, png256, png16m, and pngalpha. Choose whichever one suits you the best.

You can also use jpeg, but unless you have a disk space issue, you want as high a quality as you can manage for your OCR, and that's not jpeg.

GhostScript no longer has support for gif, but I can't imagine why you'd need that, what with png256 support.

Answer 2

You can do this using adobe reader:

1. Click the image. It will be highlighted.
2. Copy (Ctrl-C) and paste it into Paint.
3. Save as any file type you like.

Answer 3

if the image exceeds the size of you screen, you may use FastStone Capture ( a feature "Capture Scrolling Window") and save the image as JPG.

you can download the free and portable version here.

Answer 4

Install Imagemagick. Open a cmd window or terminal:

convert myfile.pdf myfile.jpg

The output will be 1 jpg file for each page in your pdf, test-0.jpg, test-1.jpg, etc.

Answer 5

If the file is less than 5MB and you aren't worried about privacy/confidentiality, then is a handy online service at http://www.go2convert.com/ that can do a lot of graphic conversions (including pdf to jpeg)

Answer 6

PDFill PDF Tools is probably the easist way to convert your PDFs to images on Windows. It'll let you export all the pages in the PDF to separate images in one shot. It also has a lot of other features available for free, which are only available in other PDF viewers if you purchase the commercial or "Pro" version.

Use the "Convert PDF to Images" button (button #10) in the screenshot below.

If you need to concatenate the images into one very tall image so you only have to feed one file to your OCR program, you can use IrfanView

Answer 7

You could use PDF-to-jpg software

Answer 8

Since you didn't include an OS tag I'll include an OSX answer:

PDFs by default open in Preview.app which allows you to use File -> Save-As:

• GIF
• ICNS
• JPEG
• JPEG-2000
• BMP
• OpenEXR
• Photoshop
• PNG
• TGA
• TIFF

Answer 9

Also PDF Xchange Viewer (Free) will do export-to-file. File → Export → Export to image.

Not only that, but I think it's the best free PDF viewer for Windows, and it has some nice markup capabilities. I have a license for Adobe Acrobat and I still prefer this unless I'm doing extensive editing, which is rarely.