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Sunday, July 29, 2012

Extract & Save page from a PDF file as an image using Google Docs [Google Drive]

Use Google Drive to save any page of a PDF document as an image file.

Often a post to this blog is triggered by a photograph or an illustration that I come across in a PDF file. An example would be this post. In such cases, I make use of PDFZilla, that was a giveaway on GAOTD, to extract all the pages as images and then proceed. If needed, I make use of eXpert PDF.
While the first is a paid commercial software, the second, while a free version, requires you install it before using. If you can't do so because, say, your System Administrator has not give you install privileges on the computer or only occasionally you need to do extraction, then Google Docs [now integrated within Google Drive] offers you a simple workaround.

Extract-Page-From-PDF-Google-Docs-Google-Drive-01
  • Upload the PDF file to Google Drive. Once uploaded, open it
  • Then, go to the page that you need to extract & right click on it.
  • As you can see in the screenshot above, Google Docs renders the page as an image file
  • Now you can simply save the image of the page to your Hard Drive
  • I've noticed that maximising the browser window & then zooming, so that only one page occupies the width of the window, gives you the largest size image of the page to save. Alternately, if the option is available, select the 'Fit page to screen width    1' available under the 'View' Tab
You could try extracting the page of this document as an image, using the method described above.
  • One can extract a page from a PDF file even when it is hosted elsewhere on the Internet. Simply go here, and paste the URL of the hosted PDF. Once you press on the 'Generate Link' button, copy the link under the 'Paste this link into email or IM' option.
  • Open the link in the browser and you can similarly save any page from the PDF as an image file.
Godspeed