How to save a whole web page as an A4 PDF
Printing to PDF is the right answer most of the time. When it mangles the page, capturing the page and slicing the capture gives you a PDF that looks exactly like the screen.
First: try Ctrl+P
Chrome can already save any page as a PDF — Ctrl+P, then Destination → Save as PDF. Do that first. The text stays selectable and searchable, the file is small, and links keep working. No extension beats that when it works.
It stops working when the site has a print stylesheet that hides content, when a chart or map is drawn on a canvas that prints blank, when a dark theme prints as a black rectangle, or when a sticky sidebar lands on top of every page. That is when a screenshot-based PDF is the better tool: what you see is exactly what you get.
Capturing the page
- Open the page and press Ctrl+Shift+K, or click the ScrollStudio icon and choose Scrolling capture.
- The page scrolls itself, one screenful at a time, and the tiles are stitched into a single tall image. Sticky headers are hidden after the first tile so they do not repeat.
- Long pages take a while. Stop and keep ends the capture and keeps what has been collected; Esc throws it away.
Turning it into A4 pages
The editor opens with the tall capture in it. Pick a page size from the preset list — A4 portrait, A4 landscape, Letter — and the slice height changes to match the page proportions. Then choose how the image is cut and press Split PDF.
- Even — same height every time. Predictable, but it will cut through a sentence.
- Auto — looks for headings, paragraph gaps and blank rows, and cuts where the page is actually empty. On documents with visible page gutters it follows those instead.
- Manual — click the preview to drop a split line, drag it to move it, press × to remove it. Ctrl+Z undoes.
Auto is a good first pass, not a final answer. Switch to Manual afterwards and fix the two or three cuts that landed badly — that is faster than fighting the automatic result.
Getting the resolution right
This is the part most people miss. A screenshot PDF is made of pixels, so its sharpness is decided before you capture, by how many pixels wide the page is on your screen. A4 at 150 dpi is about 1240 px wide. If the page renders 700 px wide in your window, the PDF will look soft no matter what you do afterwards.
Two things help, both applied before capturing:
- Widen the window, or collapse the site's sidebar, so the content column gets more pixels.
- Zoom in with Ctrl++. At 150% the same column is captured with half again as many pixels. The extension deliberately does not change the page zoom for you, because doing that silently re-flows the layout you were looking at.
Also leave Embed pages without re-compressing on in settings if the capture has fine text; it makes a larger file but no JPEG fringing around letters.
Other ways to save it
The same capture can be exported as one long PNG, as a single very tall one-page PDF, or as a ZIP of the split images if you need them as separate files. Several stored captures can also be merged into one PDF from the library.
Guides
- How to split a long screenshot into pages
- How to screenshot a scrolling panel inside a page
- Why stitched screenshots have a line at the seam
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