Our support department recently responded to a request for a code sample to convert PDF to JPEG. The customer needed to leverage LEADTOOLS to split and convert thousands of PDF files into single page JPEGs.

JPEG images are universal and can be loaded by practically any client on any operating system. If the PDF files are photos, JPEG is the perfect universal image format for conversion. JPEG is designed specifically for photo images, supporting 24 bits per pixel color and 8 bits per pixel grayscale data.

If the PDF files are text based and need to be converted to a universal image format, PNG and GIF are more appropriate. PNG and GIF support fewer bits per pixel, including 1- and 4-bits and leverage lossless compressions. These factors result in less data to be compressed and clearer images of text and clip art. Typically, PNG results in smaller file sizes when compared to GIF.

Base64 encoding is used to encode binary data, such as a PDF file, into an ASCII string format that is compatible with systems that can only handle text. For example, email attachments and binary uploads in HTML forms are converted and transmitted as Base64 encoded data.

The C# code snippet below shows how easy it is to save as any LEADTOOLS image format, including PDF, with Base64 encoding.

It is tax season in the US. My CPA wants all of my supporting documentation to be saved as PDF, but I saved all as one multi-page TIFF when I scanned them. Fortunately, I have access to LEADTOOLS OCR.

In terms of functionality and platform support, LEADTOOLS OCR is the most flexible OCR engine available. It makes converting more than 200 image types to PDF and other document formats an easy task. The resulting PDF can be an image-based or text-searchable PDF. It can even be a combination of image over text so the resulting PDF has the text, but looks exactly like the TIFF.

While PDF files are flexible and portable, unfortunately they are not always searchable. In fact, a very common request is for the ability to parse text from PDFs. Luckily, LEADTOOLS OCR Engine makes extracting searchable text from PDF files a breeze. LEAD’s AI-enhanced engine can accept any PDF (searchable or not) and extract the text from it, using OCR where necessary. After extraction LEADTOOLS can save that information to a text file, a searchable PDF file, or any of our other 150+ supported document formats.