Convert a PNG into a PDF that is made of curves

Search for a PNG-to-PDF converter and nearly every tool does one thing: it opens a blank page, drops your bitmap onto it, and saves. The picture itself is untouched. That same grid of pixels now sits inside a PDF wrapper, so a 600 px logo is still a 600 px logo — enlarge it for a banner, or hand it to a print shop, and the soft, stair-stepped edges come straight back. Only the extension changed.

This converter takes the slower route. It reads the PNG, splits it into flat colour regions, fits curves along the borders between them, and writes those curves into the PDF with the format's own cubic curve operator. What you download is a single-page PDF 1.4 with a Flate-compressed content stream, no font resources and no image object anywhere inside. Nothing in it can pixelate, because no pixels remain in it.

Do not take that on faith. Open the file and zoom to 800%: a wrapped bitmap dissolves into squares at that magnification, while a traced page holds a hard edge all the way in. Lettering is the giveaway: the counters inside an a or an e stay sharp however far you go.

Drop an image here

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PNG · JPG · WEBP

How it works

Upload the PNG. Flat artwork traces most cleanly; JPEG and WEBP work too, one image per conversion.
Choose PDF as the output format, and set the colour count: 2 for a one-colour mark, 8 to 16 for a flat logo.
Leave Draw style on Fill shapes and Shape stacking on Cut-outs so holes stay punched through.
Check the preview, then sign in with Google (free) to download the PDF.
Open the PDF, zoom to 800% and click a shape — you should select an editable path, not an image frame.

A flat PNG logo beside the traced result — the same mark rebuilt as curves, the form a vector PDF carries.

Who this is for

Vector PDF is the handoff people ask for by name. A screen printer, a sign shop, a vinyl supplier or a merch vendor will say send the logo as a vector PDF, meaning they want to place it at 3 cm on a pen and 3 m on a wall from one file. The trap is that PDF names a container, not a kind of artwork — a PDF full of pixels satisfies the request on paper and fails it in production, which is how jobs come back flagged as low resolution after approval.

It cuts the other way too. PDF opens on every machine without a plug-in and imports into Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape and most CAD and cutting software. When you need a vector a stranger can certainly open, PDF travels better than SVG — this page is about making sure what is inside it really is vector.

Settings we suggest

Set Formats to PDF; tick SVG in the same run if you also want to edit paths, and two formats add a ZIP traced from the same geometry.

Colours is the control that matters: 2 for a one-colour mark or stencil, 8 to 16 for a flat logo or badge, up to 32 for shaded artwork, within a range of 2 to 64. Fewer colours mean fewer, longer curves and a smaller file.

Keep Draw style on Fill shapes for anything headed to print, and Shape stacking on Cut-outs so a hole in a letter is punched out of the shape beneath it instead of painted over in white, which shows the moment the PDF lands on a coloured background. Group by only touches SVG grouping and does nothing here.

The width and height in millimetres reach the SVG and DXF exports; the PDF page box ignores them. That box is W × H points at 1 px = 1 pt, so a 512 px image opens as a 512 pt page, about 180.6 mm. Images above 1.5 megapixels are downscaled before tracing, and the box follows those reduced pixel dimensions.

Questions

How do I check the PDF is really vector and not my PNG in disguise?

Three checks. Zoom to 800% in any viewer: traced edges stay hard, a wrapped bitmap breaks into squares. Click a shape in Illustrator or Inkscape — you should get an editable path, not one rectangular image frame. And look for an image resource in the document properties; ours has none. Judge the download, not the on-page preview, which is a rasterised PNG 800 px on its long edge.

What page size does the PDF come out at?

The MediaBox is W × H points taken from the traced pixel dimensions at 1 px = 1 pt, and PDF counts 72 points to the inch, so a 1000 px wide image opens as a 1000 pt page, roughly 353 mm. The millimetre field feeds SVG and DXF only; set the final dimensions when you place or print, and the curves rescale exactly.

Why does the traced PDF look flatter than my PNG?

The tracer describes the image as flat colour regions bounded by curves, and a soft gradient or drop shadow has no boundary to follow, so it becomes bands. Flat artwork — logos, badges, icons, stencils, line drawings — is what this suits. Photographs convert, but raising the colour count adds bands, not a gradient.

Which PDF version is it, and will a print shop accept it?

PDF 1.4, one page, content stream compressed with FlateDecode, no embedded fonts because lettering arrives already outlined, so no missing-font warnings. Colours are written as DeviceRGB, so this is not a PDF/X file carrying an output intent. A shop that requires PDF/X or CMYK converts it their side, and because the artwork is curves, nothing softens.

Can I edit the shapes afterwards?

Yes. Every traced region is its own filled path, so you can recolour one shape, delete a background or move a node in Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape or CorelDRAW. If you expect a lot of that, add SVG to the same run — both files serialise the same geometry.

How long does it take, and what are the limits?

Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements; fine-line or noisy images take longer, and anything still running at 60 seconds stops with a suggestion to use fewer colours or a smaller image. Uploads go up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels. Free and watermark-free: the preview appears before you sign in, and a free Google sign-in unlocks the download — 10 conversions per hour before signing in, 60 per hour and 300 per day after. Download links expire after 1 hour; uploaded images and generated files are removed by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.

Updated 2026-09-15