The PDF looks fine on screen, but the printout has garbled characters, missing graphics, or the printer just stops. That is when “Print as image” helps. This guide shows the setting in Acrobat Reader, two ways to save the PDF itself as images, and what you give up by doing so.
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A normal print job sends the PDF’s text and vector graphics to the printer, which builds each page itself. If the printer struggles with a font or a complex drawing, you get garbled characters or missing parts.
“Print as image” makes your computer turn each page into a single picture first and sends that instead. The printer only has to print a picture, so font and graphics problems go away.
All of these usually mean the printer can’t handle something inside the PDF.
The free Adobe Acrobat Reader has this setting.
The setting may stay on for later print jobs. Once your problem is solved, turn it off again: normal printing is faster.
Browser PDF viewers (Chrome, Edge) and Mac Preview have no such setting. Turn the PDF into images with one of the methods below, then print that.
What you need depends on what you want to do with it.
| One image per page (JPG/PNG) | Image-only PDF | |
|---|---|---|
| Result | One picture file per page | A single PDF whose pages are pictures |
| Good for | Sharing on LINE or social media, pasting into slides, forms that only accept images | Avoiding print problems, locking typed-in form entries, making it look the same on any computer |
| Tools | PDF to JPG, PDF to PNG | PDF to JPG, then JPG & PNG to PDF |
PDF to JPG converts every page at once in your browser. The PDF isn’t uploaded; it is processed on your device.
For crisp text and thin lines with no JPEG blur, use PDF to PNG instead.
Turn the pages into images, then put them back into a PDF. It looks the same, but every page is now a picture, so it displays and prints the same way almost everywhere.
Printing this PDF has almost the same effect as Acrobat’s “Print as image”.
If black and white is fine, PDF to Grayscale produces an image-only PDF in a single step.
The text becomes part of a picture. Keep the original PDF if you might need the text later. To get text back out of an image-only PDF, use OCR.
A text-heavy PDF can grow several times larger as images. At 300 dpi, ten or more pages may be too big to email. If there is an upload limit, use 150 dpi or run the result through Compress PDF.
Text can’t be selected, but OCR can still read it. If the content is confidential, add a password instead.
Links, bookmarks and form-field functions are gone. Anything typed into fields stays visible as part of the image.
A. Yes. Click “Advanced” in the print dialog and tick “Print As Image”.
A. For ordinary documents you will hardly see a difference. Very small text and thin lines can be slightly softer, and printing can take longer.
A. For one picture per page, use PDF to JPG. For a single PDF made of images, use PDF to JPG and then JPG & PNG to PDF. Both are free and run in your browser.
A. Not exactly: the text data is gone, so keep the original. OCR can read the text back out if you need it.
A. Yes. Open PDF to JPG in Safari (iPhone) or Chrome (Android) and choose the PDF. No app is needed.