A4 or Letter — and when to use landscape
A4 (210 × 297 mm) is the standard paper format almost everywhere outside North America. If you're sending the PDF to a European client, a global team, or anyone who'll print it outside the US, A4 is the right choice. Letter (8.5 × 11 in) is the default in the United States and Canada.
Portrait works for most pages — articles, documentation, product pages, blog posts. Choose landscape when the content is wider than it is tall: data tables, pricing comparisons, dashboards, or any layout with multiple columns that would get cut off at a portrait page edge. If a page has a wide table that's hard to read at A4 portrait, landscape at Letter size is usually the clearest combination.
Why real Chrome rendering matters for PDFs
There are two ways to generate a PDF from a URL. The first is screenshot-then-flatten: convert the page to an image and embed it in a PDF. The second is print-to-PDF: use the browser's built-in print engine to lay the page out for paper. This tool uses the second method, and the difference is significant.
Screenshot-based PDFs are pixel images — text isn't selectable, links aren't clickable, and file size is large. Chrome print-to-PDF produces a real document: text is searchable and selectable, hyperlinks work, embedded fonts are included, and the file size is typically 5–10x smaller than an equivalent screenshot-based PDF.
Before printing, the page is fully rendered in a headless Chrome browser. Scripts execute, web fonts load from their CDN, lazy-loaded images trigger, and JavaScript-built layouts (React, Vue, Angular) settle into their final state. What you get is a PDF of the live page, not of a partially-loaded snapshot.
How Chrome handles page breaks
The Chrome print engine respects CSS page-break-* and break-* properties. Sites built with print stylesheets use these to avoid splitting headings from their paragraphs, keep table rows together, and insert breaks before major sections. If the site you're converting has print styles, they'll apply automatically.
Sites without print styles get Chrome's default behavior: content flows onto pages sequentially, and breaks happen wherever a page fills. For most content-heavy pages this works well. For pixel-perfect layouts — landing pages, marketing templates, complex dashboards — some elements may cut awkwardly at a page boundary. Landscape orientation usually helps by fitting more horizontal content per page, so it's worth trying before concluding a page doesn't convert cleanly.
What stays in the PDF
Text is selectable. Internal and external links are clickable. Tables and lists render as document elements, not images. Images embedded in the page are included at their rendered dimensions. The file isn't watermarked and isn't stored after your download session.
What doesn't survive: CSS animations and hover states (the page is captured in its default loaded state), video embeds (replaced with the poster frame or a placeholder), and canvas elements rendered by WebGL or game engines. For standard content pages — documentation, marketing sites, product pages, articles — none of these apply. (If you're trying to PDF a WebGL-heavy interactive demo, this isn't the right tool for that specific case.)
How this differs from pressing Ctrl+P in Chrome
When you print to PDF from your own browser, you get your browser's viewport, your installed fonts, your extensions, and your browser chrome — plus a printer dialog to dismiss. The output varies by machine and Chrome version.
This tool runs a clean Chrome instance with no extensions, a consistent viewport, and reproducible output regardless of what's installed on your computer. Every person who converts the same URL with the same settings gets the same PDF. That consistency matters when you're creating a record, a deliverable, or an automated output that needs to match every time. And since it runs server-side, you can reproduce it through the API without a browser open.
When to use the API instead
The free tool converts one URL at a time, on demand. If you need to convert the same URL on a schedule, convert a list of URLs in batch, or trigger a PDF conversion from your own application, the ScreenshotRun API does the same thing with a single GET request:
GET /v1/screenshots/capture?url=https://example.com/pricing&format=pdf&pdf_page_format=A4&pdf_landscape=false
The response is a direct download link to the PDF. Store it, email it, or embed it — no browser required, no manual steps. If you're converting the same pages regularly, you probably want the API.
FAQ
Yes. The tool uses Chrome's print engine, which embeds links as real hyperlinks in the PDF — not a flattened image. Internal links, external links, and email links are all clickable in the output. This is a key difference from screenshot-based PDF tools that convert the page to an image first.
Yes. The page is fully rendered in real Chrome before capture — the browser executes scripts, loads web fonts from Google Fonts or any CDN, and triggers lazy-loaded images before printing. What you see in the PDF is the page in its fully loaded state, not a partial render taken before assets arrive.
A4 (210 × 297 mm) is the standard paper size in Europe, Asia, and most of the world. Letter (8.5 × 11 in) is the default in the United States and Canada. For international distribution, use A4. For US-based printing or sharing with US colleagues, use Letter. The difference in dimensions is small but causes margin and layout shifts when the wrong size is used.
Use landscape for pages with wide content that would be cut off in portrait: data tables, pricing comparison pages, dashboards, spreadsheets, and any layout with multiple side-by-side columns. Portrait works well for articles, documentation, and content-heavy pages designed to be read top-to-bottom.
Some sites include CSS print stylesheets that automatically hide navigation bars, adjust font sizes, reflow layout to single-column, and insert page breaks at logical points. This is intentional behavior — the site is telling Chrome how to render it for paper. The PDF output reflects these print styles, which often produces cleaner output than a direct screenshot of the screen layout would.
No. The converter fetches pages as a public visitor would — without any session cookies or credentials. A login-protected page will produce a PDF of the login screen. For converting authenticated pages, use the ScreenshotRun API with the cookies parameter to pass your session token.
Ctrl+P uses your browser, your extensions, your cached assets, and your screen layout — output varies by machine. This tool uses a clean headless Chrome instance with no extensions and a consistent viewport, so everyone gets the same PDF from the same URL. It also runs without a printer dialog, works server-side via the API, and captures the full page rather than just your current viewport scroll position.
Generated files are available for download for 24 hours, then automatically deleted from our servers. We don't use the converted content for any other purpose. For permanent storage, download the file immediately after conversion and save it to your own system.