Convert PNG to PDF

It happens surprisingly often. A support ticket wants evidence, an expenses system takes PDF and nothing else, a report has to include a chart you exported from a spreadsheet. The image itself is correct — it is only the container that is wrong, and the fix should not cost you anything.

PDF has no PNG filter, so a PNG does not cross into the document untouched the way a JPEG does. The file is decoded, the colour channels are deflated again inside the PDF, and the transparency is written next to them as a soft mask. Every one of those steps is lossless: the pixel values that come out are the ones that went in.

For a screenshot that is more important than it sounds: screenshots are full of small text, and small text is precisely what a lossy pass smudges first. A converter that quietly re-encodes the picture as a JPEG gives you a PDF where the error message you were trying to show is slightly harder to read. This one never does that.

This sets it apart from converting a PNG to JPG. PDF understands an alpha channel, so a diagram exported without a background keeps it — it will appear over white when printed and over whatever is behind it when the PDF is placed into another document. If you wanted a solid background, add it before converting rather than after.

By default the PDF page is exactly the pixel dimensions of your image, so there is no border and no scaling — ideal for something that will be read on a screen or attached to a ticket. It is unpredictable on paper, though: a tall screenshot becomes a tall, narrow page that a printer will do something arbitrary with.

If it is going to be printed, set A4 or Letter and the image is centred on a real sheet, scaled down to fit if it is too large and never scaled up.

A PNG of a document, a slide or a terminal window is a picture of words, not words. The PDF you get cannot be searched or selected, and a system that specifically requires machine-readable text will reject it.

Where the original exists as something other than an image — a web page, a spreadsheet, a design file — exporting a PDF from that program directly gives you real text and a much smaller file. Screenshot to PDF is the right answer when the screenshot is the point, and the wrong one when it was a shortcut.

All of it happens in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, which is worth knowing when the screenshot contains an internal dashboard, a customer record or half your inbox.

Bug reports, expense claims and support tickets are usually several screenshots rather than one, and the thing on the other end wants a single file. This conversion does not assemble it: each screenshot becomes its own one-page PDF, so five images come back as five PDFs in a ZIP. Joining them is the merge tool on this site, where you set the page order yourself.

Screenshots are wide and short, which is why fit-to-image usually reads better than A4 here: a 16:9 screenshot on a portrait page leaves half the sheet empty and makes the text smaller than it needs to be.

The screenshot goes into the document as an image, which means the text in it stays a picture of text. A reader cannot select it, a search inside the PDF will not find it, and a screen reader has nothing to announce. That is worth knowing before sending a page of screenshots as documentation somebody has to work with.

If the text needs to be text, optical character recognition is the separate step that produces it, and it is a different tool on this site. What this conversion gives you is a fixed page at a fixed size, which is usually exactly the thing being asked for.