utilime

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PDF and images

Between PDFs, pictures and plain text.

About these tools

A PDF is a description of a page, not a picture of one, and moving in either direction loses something. Rendering a page to an image fixes it at one resolution and stops the text being text. Building a PDF out of images produces a document that looks right but cannot be searched, copied from, or read aloud.

Both are still the right answer often enough to need good tools. Rendering is how a page gets into a slide deck, an email, or anywhere that will not accept a PDF. Assembling images into a PDF is how you satisfy the many upload portals that reject photographs and accept documents, a rule about file extensions rather than about content.

Extraction is the third direction and the one with a hard edge. Text can only be pulled out of a PDF that has text stored in it. A scan is a photograph of a page, and no amount of extraction will find words in it. That needs optical character recognition, a different operation altogether.