How to convert a PDF to a web page

A PDF becomes a web page in one step with PDF by Zaweba: choose File > Export > Web page (.html) and save. The pictures are embedded inside the HTML file, so you end up with a single file that opens in any web browser, with no separate image folder to keep track of.

There are good reasons to want this. A web page reads comfortably on a phone, where a PDF page has to be pinched and dragged. Its text can be found by search engines. And it can be pasted into a website builder or an email newsletter in a way a PDF can't.

Why one file is handy

Many converters write an HTML file plus a folder of pictures beside it, and the page breaks the moment the two are separated. Because PDF by Zaweba embeds the pictures in the page itself, you can email the file, copy it to a USB stick or upload it to your site, and it still shows its images.

The other side of that is size. A page with a lot of large photos makes a large HTML file. If it's going on a website where speed matters, consider running File > Reduce file size on the PDF first, which shrinks the pictures, and then exporting.

Exporting the page

Open the PDF in PDF by Zaweba. If you only need part of the document on the web, take out the rest first: choose the pages you want in the thumbnails and use Pages > Extract to put them in a new tab, then export from there.

Choose File > Export, pick Web page (.html), name the file and save. Double-click the result to open it in your browser and read it through.

If it's going onto a website, the HTML can be uploaded as a page of its own, or its text and pictures copied into your site's editor. Either way, view it on a phone as well as a computer before you share the link.

Which PDFs suit it

Text-led documents make the best web pages: articles, newsletters, guides, policies, minutes and reports. Their words become real web text you can select, search and resize.

Scans are the exception. A scanned page is just a picture of words, so there's no text for the export to turn into HTML, and the page you get is mostly a picture.

Designed layouts, like posters or menus with text placed all over the page, will convert, but a web page and a printed page work differently, so check the result on a narrow screen. Sometimes the better route for a poster is a picture of the page, which File > Export can also save as PNG or JPEG.

Other formats from the same menu

Web page is one of several exports PDF by Zaweba writes with its own code. If the text is going to be edited further before it's published, a Word document is often easier to work on. If all you need is the words for a content management system, File > Export can save all the text as a plain .txt file. And for drawings that need to stay sharp at any size on a web page, SVG pictures are also offered.

PDF by Zaweba is free software for Windows that works offline with no account, so documents can be turned into web pages before anyone else sees them.