When Adobe introduced the PDF format, I don’t think they expected PDF files to become so popular. Users save many documents and files in PDF format: old emails, invoices, resumes, invoices and even images. Along with the spread of the PDF format, a wide variety of programs and tools emerged on the Internet: viewers and readers, starting with Acrobat Reader; PDF converters and creators, extractors, programs designed to change the order of pages in files; tools that split and merge; a large number of libraries that developers use to create their own utilities. Most of them are commercial, but there are also free programs available.
A smaller niche is represented by tools that convert an input PDF file into an image. BMP, JPEG, PNG, and GIFF are some of those image formats. The idea is simple: each page of a file is transformed into a single image. DPI settings and image quality are important features that should be available to users. If the tool is free, it is even better. Here is a selection of free PDF to image converters that will help you convert any PDF to image.
PDFCreator is one of the most complex solutions available; It was originally developed to convert any document to PDF using a virtual printer, but it will also transform a given PDF into an image. It uses Ghostscript and is released under the GNU license. This means that the font is available for you to modify, but only under the same GNU license terms. Originally created on the SourceForge platform, it was later moved to the author’s website, PDFForge.org. It works on Windows and can convert to BMP, JPEG, PNG and TIFF.
ConvertPDFtoImage is a free web solution that will convert a PDF to an image. The process is quite simple: you select the input PDF file and click the “Convert and Download” button. You have to wait a couple of minutes, depending on server load. After the conversion process is complete, click the download button and you will be prompted to save a file with the output images. You can’t choose the image type, you can’t convert larger files, it’s a bit slow, but it’s web-based, platform-independent, and free.
123PDFtoImage is a free PDF to image conversion software that recently appeared on the web. With this tool, you can convert more PDF documents at once, select from all pages or just a selection, choose DPI settings and quality of output images. Support BMP, JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS and other formats. It’s free for non-commercial environments and there’s a professional edition for those who need more features. It works on all versions of Windows and the graphical user interface is smooth and easy to use.