Convert BMP to PDF

Then the conversion produces a picture of the text rather than the text itself, and searching it finds nothing. Run /pdf-ocr/ to add a recognised text layer first; optical character recognition turns the scanned pixels into selectable, searchable characters that the conversion can then carry through properly.

Yes, and the BMP would not have. Browsers ship a decoder for PDF and none for BMP, so a BMP link forces a download while a PDF renders inline. That is usually the deciding factor when the file is going onto a web page rather than into an application. A PDF looks byte-for-byte identical on every machine and every printer, which is why contracts, invoices and academic papers all live in it.

Keep them at their native pixel size. A BMP is what a screen capture is saved as, and screen text is drawn one pixel thin — scale it up or down inside the document and the letterforms blur immediately, because there is no spare detail to resample from. Place the image at full size and change the page zoom instead; if it genuinely has to be smaller, re-capture the window at a smaller size rather than shrinking the picture afterwards. BMP needs no decoder library at all, so it remains the safe interchange format for embedded systems and legacy Windows tooling.

It depends entirely on whether real text is present. A PDF generated from a document carries an actual text layer and is searchable; a PDF built from scans or images is a picture of text and is not, until OCR adds a layer. /pdf-ocr/ does that, and it is worth running before any conversion that expects to read the words.

Headings, lists, tables and images are kept, and the fonts used are embedded in the PDF, so it looks the same in every viewer. A font that is not installed on our conversion servers (Calibri, for example) is replaced with a similar one, so line breaks can shift. An image file becomes a PDF page that shows the image.

Not on this page: each BMP you upload becomes a separate PDF. To combine them, convert them here first, then join the PDF files into one document with /pdf-merge/.

A document keeps the page size and orientation saved in it, so a Word file set up as US Letter landscape stays that way. A plain text file has no page setup and comes out as A4 portrait. The converter has no page size or orientation setting, so change the page setup in the original file before converting if you need something different.

Yes when the BMP contains real text (DOCX, ODT, HTML, TXT). Image-based BMP produces an image-only PDF — to make it searchable, use /pdf-ocr/ after conversion to run optical character recognition.

Not on this site. The converter has no password or permission settings, and epub.to does not have a PDF password tool. Download the PDF and add a password in a PDF editor that supports it, such as Adobe Acrobat.

It depends mostly on the pictures. A text document usually gives a small PDF, because only the text and the parts of the fonts it uses are stored, while photos and scanned pages make up most of the size of a larger file. The converter has no compression setting; to shrink a finished PDF, run it through /pdf-compress/.