A page from a report for a slide, a certificate to post, a diagram to drop into a document — sometimes a picture is easier to place than a PDF. Upload your file above and each page comes back as a separate PNG.
PNG is the right choice for most documents, and the reason is worth understanding rather than taking on trust. Below: what lossless actually means for a page of text, the resolution numbers that decide whether it stays readable, and when JPG is genuinely the better option.
The two formats were built for different kinds of picture, and a document page falls firmly on PNG's side.
JPEG compression was designed for photographs. It works by discarding detail the eye is unlikely to notice in continuous, gradual tones — skin, sky, foliage. It handles hard edges badly, because hard edges are precisely the information it is built to throw away. Around text the result is faint halos and a soft mush in small type, obvious the moment anyone zooms in or prints the page.
PNG is lossless. Every pixel is reproduced exactly, however many times the file is saved. A document page is text, ruled lines, table borders and chart axes — exactly the content JPEG mishandles and PNG preserves perfectly.
PNG also supports transparency, which JPG does not. Useful if you want a diagram or a logo lifted from a page to sit over a coloured background elsewhere.
A PDF stores text as instructions to draw glyphs, so it stays sharp at any zoom. An image is a fixed grid of pixels. Rendering converts one into the other, and the resolution you choose determines how much survives.
Reference points for an A4 or Letter page, measured in DPI — dots per inch:
The rule that matters: you cannot recover detail afterwards. Render at 96 DPI and enlarge the result and you get a blurry image no sharpening will fix. When unsure, render higher than you think you need and scale down — that direction works perfectly.
Lossless means bigger, often several times bigger, and there are cases where that is a poor trade.
For a page dominated by a full-bleed photograph, PNG stores every pixel of an image where the eye genuinely cannot detect JPEG's compression. You gain nothing visible and pay for it in file size on every page load.
Choose JPG for photo-heavy pages, for anything going onto a web page where load time matters, and when you need to email a lot of pages at once.
Stay with PNG for text, tables, charts, diagrams, scanned documents and anything a reader will zoom into or print.
One thing that cannot be undone: converting an already-compressed JPG to PNG does not restore sharpness. It preserves the existing damage in a larger file.
Two losses, and both matter more than people expect.
The text stops being text. Nobody can select or copy a sentence, Ctrl+F finds nothing, and search engines read none of it. Post a page as an image on a website and its content is invisible to Google entirely.
Screen readers find nothing at all. A page rendered as an image is completely inaccessible to a blind or partially sighted reader — there is no text to read aloud. If you publish one, write alt text describing it. Fifteen seconds, supported everywhere, and the only thing that makes the content available to either a screen reader or a search engine.
Where searchability matters, consider whether you need an image at all. Extracting the page as a PDF keeps the text intact and is just as easy to share.
PDF to JPG suits photographic pages and smaller files, JPG to PDF works the other way, Split PDF extracts a page while keeping its text, and Compress Image shrinks the results. Browse all PDF tools.