DEV Community

堿地
堿地

Posted on

Inside the Browser: How Canvas Handles PDF Rasterization

During PDF → PNG conversion, the browser:

  • Loads the PDF as a binary stream
  • Renders each page to an off-screen canvas
  • Converts the canvas bitmap into a PNG blob
  • Triggers download of the final file

This process is extremely fast because it uses GPU acceleration when available.

If you want to see this in action, tools like https://pdftopng.io
provide a practical demonstration of real-time browser rasterization.

It’s a great example of how Canvas and PDF.js work together under the hood.

Top comments (0)