PDF from Website

As a Website Designer, a lot of clients have asked over the years if it's possible to create a PDF from a website. Well, it is possible, but there is usually no quick and easy perfect solution. You can convert a webpage to a PDF for free, but it will take a little time and energy, and the resulting PDF is often not ideal for printing since websites were not intended to be printed.

Use a Browser Tool to make a PDF from Web Page:

One way to create a PDF from Website, albeit not perfect, is to use a browser tool like Chrome's GoFullPage.  This tool allows us to capture individual webpages and save them as PDFs, PNGs or JPG files, so we could do that with each page and then put all the PDFs together into one PDF that could be linked to. GoFullPage screen captures are not perfect, but are a solution, if you really need a PDF and it is not intended for printing. The reason it won't well for printing is that the GoFullPage screen capture tool doesn’t have the best resolution for printing especially with text, and the PDF page breaks are not always ideal since most modern webpages are very tall and vertical and don’t translate to 8.5x11 or 8.5x14 sizes perfectly.  Text can get cut off.

Here’s an example of the homepage in a PDF from the GoFullPage tool. You can see how a sentence gets cut in the middle of a page break which is not ideal. Plus, to make a PDF using this tool, you will need to create the PDFs of each page on the website, and then combine them into a PDF document in the order desired.

How do I convert a Web page to PDF and preserve its look?

There isn't an exact way to preserve most web page's look – because most modern websites are designed to scroll vertically, so it's hard to fit them perfectly on a PDF that is sized at 8.5x11" or 8.5x14". Often the pages get cut off... but there are workarounds, read more below...

How to save a webpage as PDF without it getting cutoff? There isn't an easy way or tool that I know of that will work perfectly and create webpage PDFs without any content being cut off or have page breaks in the middle of a sentence, for example. What you can do, is use your computer's screen capture tools, or use a screen capture plugin like GoFullPage to capture PNGs of the pages, then bring them into a design program such as InDesign and crop / cut up the webpage sections as desired to fit on the desired page size such as 8.5x11". This is puzzling work, to get it all right and consistent and you will likely have gaps and page breaks that are not ideal for the content. I typically would suggest, as a Graphic Designer, that if you want a professional print-ready PDF, then you're better of designing the webpage content by scratch in InDesign rather than trying to hack a website to work in an 8.5x11 printout.

If the PDF needs to be printed it would be best to design a printable version in a layout program:

Using a layout program like InDesign is a much more appropriate solution to translating a website into a printable format. Yes, it takes more time, but if you want a seamless good looking PDF document of your website that looks good printed, too, it's worth it.