PDF files are very popular and they are very popular because they work on all the platforms. In order to read a PDF file you need a PDF viewer like XpdfReader. This PDF reader is open-source and is available for Linux and Windows, for both of which it is available in GUI as well as CLI editions. For the macOS, it is being offered only in the command line tools version.
If you want to convert a PDF page into an image file, then you can use XpdfReader. This software can export any of the PDF pages into image files of many different types – JPEG, TIFF and PNG. Here is how it is done:
- First of all you have to download and install XpdfReader from https://www.xpdfreader.com/.
- Open the PDF file from which you want to extract pages in the image files format in XpdfReader.
- Select the page that you want to save as an image. Alternatively, you can also select a rectangular region
- In the XpdfReader window, select File and then Save Image.
- A new window will be opened in which we can select the target image file type – JPEG, TIFF or PNG. We can also choose a resolution of the image file to be produced in terms of DPI. Most importantly, we can also specify the page number or the selected region. Clicking on the OK button will ask you for a folder where the image is to be saved.
So this is how we can convert any of the pages inside a PDF file into images. The method produces very high quality image files. The same method can also be used to save only a region on a PDF page into an image file. However, we can save only one page at a time. It would have been better if we could save the entire PDF file into a number of images – each image belonging to the pages inside the PDF file.