Turning a PDF page into an image is simple enough — the format you export to is the part people skip past, and it's the part that decides whether the result looks sharp or file sizes get out of hand.
JPG: smaller files, lossy compression
JPG compresses by approximating the image, throwing away detail a viewer is unlikely to notice. That makes it a good default for pages with photos, gradients, or scanned content — file sizes stay small, and the quality loss is barely visible at normal zoom. The tradeoff shows up on pages with sharp text or fine lines: JPG compression can introduce a faint blur or blocky artifacts around high-contrast edges, which is more noticeable on a page of text than a photo.
PNG: larger files, lossless quality
PNG doesn't throw anything away — every pixel is preserved exactly. That makes it the better choice for pages that are mostly text, diagrams, tables, or anything with hard edges and flat colors, where you want crisp lines rather than smoothed-over detail. The cost is file size: a lossless format simply can't compress as aggressively as one that's allowed to approximate, so PNG exports of the same page usually end up notably larger than JPG.
A simple rule of thumb
If the page is mostly a photo or scanned image, export to JPG. If the page is mostly text, diagrams, or anything you might zoom into, export to PNG. If you're not sure and file size isn't a concern, PNG is the safer default — you can always compress it down afterward, but you can't recover detail a lossy format already discarded.
Both conversions run entirely in your browser using pdf.js to render each page and export it directly — no upload required either way.
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