How to capture a PDF that opens in a web viewer
Whether a PDF can be captured depends entirely on who is drawing it — Chrome itself, or the website.
Which viewer am I looking at?
Look at the address bar.
- The URL ends in
.pdfand the page has a plain grey toolbar with page controls at the top right — that is Chrome's built-in viewer. Chrome does not allow extensions to place an overlay inside it, and there is no way around that from an extension. - The URL is a normal page on the site, often with the PDF path after a
#, and the toolbar looks like part of the site's design — that is the site's own viewer, usually PDF.js embedded in the page. This one behaves like any other web page.
The site's own viewer: scrolling capture works
Start a scrolling capture as usual. The viewer scrolls inside its own container rather than scrolling the document, so the capture targets that container — see capturing a scrolling panel for what that means.
Then split. A stitched document capture has a grey gutter between pages, and automatic splitting prefers those gutters over an arbitrary height, trimming the gutter away instead of leaving grey at the top of the next slice. In practice you get one PDF page per document page.
Two practical notes. Let the viewer finish rendering each screenful — increase the capture delay in settings if pages come out blank or half-drawn. And zoom the viewer in before capturing if you want a sharp result; see the resolution section.
Chrome's built-in viewer: capture visible, then merge
Only Capture visible area works there. It is tedious but it works:
- Set the viewer to fit one page to the window.
- Capture the visible area, press the page-down control, capture again, and repeat.
- Open the library, tick the captures in order, and merge them into a single PDF.
If the PDF is a local file, capture also needs "Allow access to file URLs" enabled for the extension on the Chrome extensions page.
A better option when you have it
If you can download the PDF, you do not need a screenshot at all — you already have the document, at full quality, with selectable text. Capture it when you cannot download it, when you need the viewer's annotations visible, or when you want the whole thing as one image.
Guides
- How to save a whole web page as an A4 PDF
- How to split a long screenshot into pages
- How to screenshot a scrolling panel inside a page
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