How to Save a Screenshot as a PDF in Chrome

Two completely different things get called “saving a page as a PDF,” and the reason people end up with a file that looks nothing like what was on screen is that they reached for the wrong one.

The difference, in one paragraph

Printing to PDF rebuilds the page for paper. The browser throws away the screen layout and lays the content out again at paper width, in columns it chooses, with page breaks it chooses. You get selectable text and a small file.

Screenshotting to PDF takes a picture of the page as it actually looked and puts the picture in a PDF. Nothing reflows. What you saw is what is in the file. The text is part of the image, so you cannot select or search it.

Neither is better. They answer different questions. Print-to-PDF answers “what did this page say?” Screenshot-to-PDF answers “what did this page look like?”

If you want the words: print to PDF

This is built into Chrome and costs nothing. Press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P on a Mac), change the destination to Save as PDF, and save.

Open More settings first and two options matter:

• Background graphics is off by default. Turn it on or you lose every colored panel, every highlight, and often the branding, which is usually the moment people decide the PDF is wrong.
• Scale set to a smaller number fits more per page and reduces the number of awkward breaks.

Where it falls down:

• Page breaks land wherever they land. A table or a chart routinely gets sliced across two pages.
• Many sites ship a print stylesheet that strips navigation, images and sidebars on purpose. That is the site deciding what printing means, not Chrome misbehaving.
• Anything drawn after you scroll to it, and anything inside its own scrolling panel, may not be in the file at all.

If the page came out unrecognisable, none of that is fixable from the print dialog. That is the signal to take a picture instead.

If you want the look: screenshot to PDF

Here the goal is a faithful record: the layout, the colors, the thing exactly as it appeared. Three routes, worst to best.

Screenshot first, convert afterwards

Capture a PNG, then open it in something that can export PDF. On a Mac, Preview does it with File then Export as PDF. On Windows, Photos prints to Microsoft Print to PDF. Word or Google Docs will also swallow an image and export a PDF.

It works, and it is free. It is also several steps, and each app has its own opinion about margins, so a tall image often arrives shrunk into the middle of a letter-sized page with white space all round.

Chrome’s own full-page capture, then convert

Chrome can capture a whole page without any extension, through DevTools. It is covered step by step in how to screenshot an entire webpage in Chrome. You still end up with a PNG and the conversion step above.

An extension that exports PDF directly

One click, one file, no conversion, and the page stays as it looked. This is what PageStill does: capture the whole page, mark it up if you need to, then save as PDF. PDF export is part of the paid editor at $11.99 a year or $24.99 once. Capturing pages and saving them as PNG costs nothing.

What happens to a very long page

A PDF page has a fixed size, so a capture several screens tall has to be dealt with somehow. Tools do one of three things, and it is worth knowing which you are getting:

• Squeeze it onto one page. The whole capture, scaled down until it fits. Nothing is missing and nothing is readable.
• Split it across pages. The capture is sliced at regular intervals and each slice becomes a page. Readable, and the usual right answer.
• One enormous page. A single PDF page the full height of the capture. Fine on screen, unprintable, and some readers refuse it.

PageStill splits long captures across pages automatically. If you are using something else, this is the setting to look for before you send the file to anyone.

Which one you want

• Quoting from it, or someone needs to search it? Print to PDF. You need selectable text.
• Proving what something looked like? Screenshot to PDF. A receipt, an order confirmation, a price, a post before it gets edited. The layout is the evidence.
• Sending a design or a page for review? Screenshot to PDF, and mark it up before you send it.
• Filing it, and you are not sure which? Screenshot. A reflowed PDF cannot be turned back into what the page looked like, but a picture can always be read.

One thing worth knowing about the text

In a screenshot PDF the words are pixels. You cannot select them, search them, or copy them, and neither can anyone you send it to. Some tools offer to run OCR and lay recognised text invisibly over the image. That makes it searchable, but OCR guesses, and a guessed price or account number in a document you are keeping as a record is worse than no text at all.

If it matters that the text is exact, keep both files. They are small, and they answer different questions.