Save a webpage as PDF, exactly as it looks

Chrome already has Print to PDF, so it is fair to ask why anything else exists. The answer is that printing is not capturing. Print to PDF applies the site's print stylesheet, and print stylesheets are an afterthought on most sites — backgrounds vanish, columns collapse, navigation disappears, dark themes turn white, and interactive components render as empty boxes.

Sometimes that is what you want. When you need the page as it appeared — for a record, a review, an approval, a piece of evidence — you need the pixels, not a re-render.

Print to PDF versus capture to PDF

Choosing page settings

Four decisions, and what each is actually for.

Paper size

A4 or Letter for anything a person will read or print. Legal buys extra height per page. Fit to image makes one single page exactly as tall as the capture, which is right for archiving a long page as a single unbroken document.

Orientation

Portrait for articles and documents. Landscape for wide dashboards and tables, where cutting horizontally loses more than it costs in page count.

Where page breaks land

A break through the middle of a line of text is the difference between a usable document and an annoying one. Break positions are nudged towards horizontal bands of low visual activity — the gaps between paragraphs — rather than falling on a fixed interval.

Quality

PDF pages embed JPEG data, so quality trades directly against file size. High quality is right for anything with small text; lower is fine for a long visual archive.

Saving a page as PDF

1. 1

   Capture the page

   Click the toolbar icon and wait for the scroll to finish.

2. 2

   Choose PDF on the result page

   Pick paper size and orientation. The page count updates as you change them.

3. 3

   Save

   The PDF is assembled in your browser and downloaded. Nothing is uploaded at any point. Full walkthrough in the guide.