When Adobe introduced the PDF format, I don’t think they expected PDF files to be so popular. So many documents and files are now kept by users as PDFs: old emails, invoices, resumes, bills, even pictures. Amidst the proliferation of the PDF format, a 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 build their utility. Most of them are commercial, but freeware programs are also available.
A small niche is represented by tools that convert an input PDF file into an image. BMP, JPEG, PNG and GIF are some of them image formats. The idea is simple: each page from the file is converted into an image. DPI settings and image quality are important features that should be available to the users. If the tool is free, that’s 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 convert any given PDF to image. It uses Ghostscript, and it is published under the GNU license. This means that the source is available for you to tweak, but only under the same GNU license terms. Originally built on the SourceForge platform, it was later moved to the author’s own website, PDFForge.org. It works on Windows, and can convert to BMP, JPEG, PNG and TIFF.
ConvertPDFtoImage is a free web based solution that will convert PDF to image. The process is quite simple: you select the input PDF file and click on the “Convert and Download button”. You may have to wait a few minutes depending on the server load. After the conversion process is complete, click the Download button and you will be prompted to save an archive with the output images. You can’t choose the image type, you can’t convert large files, it’s a bit slow, but it’s web based, platform independent, and free.
123PDFtoImage is a free PDF to Image converter software that appeared on the web recently. Using this tool you can convert multiple PDF documents at once, choose between all pages or just a selection, choose DPI settings and the quality of the output images. It supports BMP, JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS and other formats. It’s free for non-commercial environments and there’s a commercial version for those who need more features. Works on all Windows versions and the graphical user interface is smooth and user-friendly.