You may have heard me talk about one of my volunteer jobs, which is putting together a weekly slide show of upcoming activities for electronic monitors at my church. Each week I look at the bulletin and select six different events to showcase. If it's an event I don't already have a slide for I choose a background or border, add some text and maybe some clip art, and call it done.
Occasionally someone will send me an email with information they want added. The attachment is usually the size of a standard piece of paper, and I've learned that those are much too small and low resolution to show up on the 40 inch screens. I've had no formal training for this job and don't know a whole lot about changing resolutions, so I have to go back to the person and tell them I can't help them unless they make some changes on their end.
Sometimes the file I get will be in a format the screen (a smart TV) won't recognize. I've learned how to fix many of those, but today I got an email that had a PDF attached. I was able to open it, but no matter how many times I left and right clicked on the page and program icons I couldn't figure out a way to change the file type to the JPEG I needed.
I decided to take the problem to Google, asking if there was a way to convert the two types of files. Would you be surprised if I told you there is? The first result of my search was PDF2JPG.net, which touted that it was a free online service that would easily turn the first type of file into the second.
After uploading my PDF it only took a minute to change it to my monitor-friendly file. I downloaded the result back to my computer, then resized it with Paint and had a nice-looking advertisement for a charity golf tournament. As a bonus, the website told me that they participate in the Plant a Billion Trees program sponsored by the Nature Conservancy, planting a tree for every 5,000 converted PDFs. They had already contributed 20553 trees, and I did my part to help them plant one more.
Five years ago today: I Love Happy Endings
You are good, sounds like you could get a job doing this stuff.
ReplyDeleteI've learned quite a bit, but I'm far from an expert :-)
DeleteGood to know. My PhotoShop app can do something similar, but if you don't have PhotoShop, then you need a work-around.
ReplyDeleteI don't have that program. Hence the workaround.
Deletebrilliant! You might want to look into Photoshop Elements. It's a scaled back, MUCH cheaper version of Photoshop, but meets all my needs for that type of software. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip. I'll look into it.
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