Convert PNG to PDF
Most PNG-to-PDF tools paste the pixels onto a page. This one traces them, so the PDF is outlines that stay sharp at any zoom and separate at the press.
- Input
- PNG
- Output
- Engine
- WASM, in your tab
- Price
- Free preview
Drop an image here, or paste
Your image is never uploaded. It is traced in this tab.Open the full converter
Preset
- 01Logo — set for this page16 colours
- 02Line artBlack & white
- 03Photo64 colours
- 04Embroidery8 colours · Cutout
- 05Vinyl4 colours · Cutout
- 06LaserBlack & white · Polygon
- Output · SVG · PDF · EPS [soon] · DXF [soon]
- Preview free · download with Pro €9.00 / month
- Your file stays in this tab
Why vectortrace
- Ticket 1 / 3
In-browser and private
The engine is WebAssembly running in a worker on your own machine. Your image is never uploaded — so there is nothing to leak, nothing to delete, and nothing to take on trust.
- Ticket 2 / 3
Editable paths, not a wrapper
The engine groups the image into colour regions, takes the boundary between them and fits curves to it. What comes out is real geometry — one fill per region, every node yours to move — produced in the tab and never on a server.
- Ticket 3 / 3
Formats print and production use
SVG and PDF today; EPS and DXF for cutters, engravers and embroidery software as the exporters land. Real files, opened in Illustrator, Inkscape and LibreCAD — not an SVG with a JPEG inside it.
Format facts
| Format facts | PNG · in | PDF · out |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Raster. A grid of pixels. | Vector. A page description with the paths embedded. |
| Scaling | Blurs or pixelates past its native size. | Sharp at any size. |
| Colour | Up to 16.7 million colours with 8-bit alpha. Lossless. | Solid fills, with real page units and a defined page box. |
| Editable in | Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity Photo. | Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity Designer, Acrobat. |
| Typical use | Screenshots, web images, marks exported from a design tool. | Sending artwork to a printer, who expects a page size. |
Worth knowing
There are two completely different things called "PNG to PDF". The common one puts your bitmap on a PDF page — useful for archiving a screenshot, useless for print, and it blurs the moment anyone zooms. This one traces the image and writes the resulting paths into the PDF, so the file has no raster in it at all.
PDF is a good handoff format because everyone can open it and it carries a real page size. If the recipient needs to edit rather than print, send the SVG as well; a PDF is editable in Illustrator and Inkscape but it was not designed to be an interchange format.
Vector PDF and vector SVG hold the same geometry here — the exporters are two writers over one document, so the paths, the node count and the palette are identical.
How it works
Drop the PNG
Drop the artwork you want as a vector PDF.
Trace and check the zoom
Zoom the preview to 800%. If the edges are still crisp, the geometry is right; if they are stepped, you are looking at a bitmap.
Export the PDF
The page carries a real size, so set the physical dimensions before you send it to print.
Benchmark
Measured, not marketed. The corpus, the method and every figure the run produced are published in full.
Methodology → /benchmarks- boundary error, p95
- 0.39 px
- region-count error
- 0.113
- node-count ratio
- 6.35×
Questions
- 01How is this different from the usual PNG-to-PDF tool?
- The usual tool embeds the bitmap on a page, so the PDF is the PNG with a wrapper and it blurs when zoomed. Here the image is traced first and the PDF contains paths, which is why it stays sharp and can be edited.
- 02Can I still get the original pixels in a PDF?
- Not from here — that is a different job and your operating system print dialogue already does it. This page is for when you need the artwork as vector.
- 03Does the PDF open in Illustrator?
- Yes. It is ordinary vector PDF, so Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity Designer and Acrobat all open it, and the paths are selectable.
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