Converting PDF files to image files

When assembling their Achievement Pack, Participants can only make use  of image files; and yet they may have written illustrated diaries, presentation reports etc that they wish to incorporate. This page suggests one way of converting document files to image files, although it is admittedly a bit of a palaver - but at least it's free!

• Open the PDF file in Acrobat Reader and navigate to the page you wish to convert

• On the top menu bar, click Tools > Select & Zoom > Snapshot Tool

• Select the whole of the text that you wish to convert but, apart from an all-round margin, no more.

• Click OK in the dialogue box, and then set the zoom level to 400%

• Click <Ctrl C>

• Open Paint (it's in Start > All Programs > Accessories)

• Click Edit > Paste or <Ctrl V>

• Click File > Save As... and then, from the Save As Type box, select JPEG

• Finally, give the file a name and choose a suitable location before pressing Save

Unfortunately, this only works for PDF files. If you have a Word file to deal with, you will have to convert it to PDF first. How you do that depends on whether you have Word 7 or an earlier version. If you type "Word to PDF" into Google, a whole range of options will appear. I've got an Adobe lookalike called DeskPDF, which works very well: you just print the Word file in the ordinary way, but you change the printer to DeskPDF instead of your regular printer, and it produces a PDF file on disk instead of a printout on paper. Magic!

Before printing the Word document to a PDF file, adjust the right margin so that the overall form of the text is approximately square. The system is likely to protest that the resolution is too low otherwise.