PDF to image conversion workaround

Sunday, February 22, 2026 • pdf ebook

Motivation

I’m using ReadEra to read magazines in PDF format. It usually works fine. But yesterday, one PDF didn’t show up correctly. It looks like some font displaying problem. The text is there, but not visible. You could select it, but nothing is displayed. Such text is a bit hard to read…

The workaround

Since the PDF looks good in other applications, I don’t think it is a bad PDF. The PDF has lots of fonts embedded, but so did the earlier issues of the magazines in the past, which were displayed correctly.

The simple try to print the PDF with another application again to PDF didn’t fix the problem: The text was still missing.

So there is another workaround needed: We just convert the whole PDF into a series of images and then create a new PDF from these images. That way, there should be no problems in displaying the PDF since it consists only of images. The downside however is, that the PDF is now entirely made up of images and no text. But as a human, I’m still good at converting text on images into text myself.

Step 1

You’ll need ghostscript, which is often already installed on Linux systems.

mkdir pdfimages
gs -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=pdfimages/page-%03d.jpg -r300x300 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -f input.pdf

This will convert input.pdf into a series of jpeg images into the folder pdfimages. You can simply verify, that the pages are displayed correctly. In case you see the same missing text, then this workaround won’t help you - then Ghostscript has the same issue as ReadEra.

Step 2

Now we’ll combine all the pages back into a new handy PDF using img2pdf.

img2pdf pdfimages/*.jpg -o input_images.pdf

Now we have again a single PDF and since it only consists of images, there won’t be a display problem.

Result

The result looks like this:

The file size of the new PDF is much bigger now. You might experiment with more options when generating the jpegs or the PDF (e.g. resolution, compression). But as a workaround, this is good enough.

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27740379/pdf-to-jpeg-conversion-using-ghostscript
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4283245/using-ghostscript-to-convert-jpeg-to-pdf