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I want to save a webpage as pdf file. A lot of tools for this task change the look/format of the webpage. I'm looking for printing the webpage to PDF as is (as on web browser) without any manipulation on style or alignment, or loss of any webpage's static components. A similar question is this

However, that question has an added criteria that the text must remain selectable. I don't need that. The pdf pages can be simply screenshots of the webpage. Currently, I do this manually. I take screenshot of the entire page, then divide it into several smaller images using Paint and save each image. Finally, I convert the images into one pdf file. This is tedious for very large webpages. So, I am basically looking for a tool to automate this.

This is a webpage I want to save exactly as it looks in the browser.

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  • Just to be clear - exactly as is, ads and whatnot included?
    – Peregrino69
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 15:49
  • I would prefer if the ads were excluded.
    – fac120
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 16:37
  • Might be too simple but have you tried printing the website with ctrl+p and the changing you printer to pdf? It works on chrome and if you have add block it will not print the adds.
    – dmb
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 17:46
  • @dmb the problem is printing changes the look. Sometimes, the output is quite terrible like this
    – fac120
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 18:45
  • @fac120 A couple of years ago I assembled a tool that needed to scrap a website and take SS’s as evidence but it may be a little out of scope to you as it used python3 with selenium, lxml and requests library. With all these you can save the site locally and present it the way you need.
    – dmb
    Commented Sep 14, 2021 at 0:00

5 Answers 5

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There are Firefox addons (and possibly Chrome addons) that take full webpage screenshots and can save them to PDF.

For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/fireshot/

You can probably find more by googling something like: chrome/firefox screenshot plugin/addon PDF

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  • I was hoping to save large webpages as multiple pages. But, this works too. Selecting as answer.
    – fac120
    Commented Sep 14, 2021 at 2:52
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The one solution I found is OPERA (right click) SaVe as PDF (will save as exactly laid out on screen).

I looked for many solutions this is the only Browser that does it right.

enter image description here

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  • Amazing. Finally. I did not want an add-on and Opera in April 2024 does the trick, and as a bonus you can even get portable Opera (no install). In Opera use the "Snapshot" button in the address bar to get a PDF of the page, just as it appears.
    – DAG
    Commented Apr 17 at 13:34
  • I installed Opera to test this and it only printed the first page also 😥
    – boardtc
    Commented May 21 at 16:22
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Have you tried a virtual PDF printer like pdforge

https://www.pdfforge.org/

If there is an issue with it, dozens of other companies make similar products.

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  • I have just used online version of the tool given here. But, the output is very bad. screenshot
    – fac120
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 14:17
  • Hmm That is odd, but definitely not usable, well others ones exist.
    – cybernard
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 20:09
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Firefox 97.0.2 (at least in macOS) if you right-click the web page there is a screenshot function in which you can select either "Save full page" or "Save visible".

This creates a PNG file with "screenshot", the current date and time, and the title from the page (not the URL). While I would have preferred a PDF with selectable text and links in it, this is the most faithful method I have just found.

Warning regarding some other solutions, a browser extension required access to passwords of web sites!!! I didn't install it!

Just saving as full page was fine for some websites, but not for something like an OpenSea listing of your own NFTs. Also, I really wanted to find an alternative that did not run scripts after launching the page. Right-clicking and select Quicklook (in Finder on macOS) actually renders those pages fine, that otherwise replaces the saved content when you open it in a modern browser. Opening such a page with another browser that won't run the javascripts was also fine, but my search today had me really not wanting any scripts to run, yet the currently displayed information to be saved.

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I had a page where all images were initially hidden and only got faded in when you scrolled them into the viewpoint - as a result none of the Print solutions worked. The only solution i found by sheer luck was new Page screenshot function that got introduced into the Edge last week - it is able to save the screenshot even of the part of the page that is scrolled off. It was then rather tricky to get such a large image converted to PDF (i have pdfsimpli subscription but the online conversion looked terrible, but support did it for me manually).

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