How to save a webpage as a PDF without cutting it off
Short answer: in the print dialog turn on Background graphics and set Scale to Fit to page width; if lines are still cut or the page is a web app, capture the page with FullPage Capture (free) and export it as a PDF with page breaks between lines. Checked in Chrome, September 2026.
You pressed Ctrl+P, chose Save as PDF, and got a page with the right edge missing, lines of text sliced between pages, no background colours and half of what you were looking at. That is not a bug in your browser; it is what printing a web page means. Here is why it happens, the print settings that fix the easy cases, and how to get a PDF that looks exactly like the page when they do not.
The quick answer
An article or a document: Print to PDF with Background graphics on and Scale set to Fit to page width usually does it. Reader mode first, if the site has clutter.
A web app, a dashboard, a page that must look like the screen, or lines that keep getting cut: capture the page with FullPage Capture and export the capture as a PDF. Free, and the PDF is the page as you saw it.
Why Print to PDF cuts your page off
Printing does not photograph the page. The browser re-lays it out for paper using the site's print stylesheet, a set of rules most sites never wrote or wrote years ago. Four things follow from that:
- Re-flow. Columns move, sidebars vanish or pile up, fixed-width layouts overflow the paper and are clipped on the right.
- Backgrounds off. By default Chrome drops background colours and images, so dark themes turn white and highlighted boxes lose their fill.
- Pagination by height. The page is cut into paper-sized slices at fixed heights. Unless the site says where a safe break is, a slice can land through a line of text, a table row or an image.
- Only what the page itself scrolls. Gmail, Notion, Slack, Trello and most dashboards scroll a panel inside the page. Printing captures the page element, so you get one screen of the panel, however far you scrolled.
The first two have settings. The last two do not.
Method 1: Print to PDF, with the settings that help
Worth doing right before reaching for anything else. This is for Chrome and Edge; Firefox's dialog has the same options under different names.
- Open the print dialogPress Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) and set the destination to Save as PDF.
- Open More settingsTurn on Background graphics, so colours and images behind text are kept. Set Scale to Fit to page width if the right edge is cut, or a smaller percentage such as 80% if columns still overflow. Set Margins to Minimum or None.
- Check the preview, then savePage through the preview: look for lines cut between pages and for panels that stop early. If the page is an app rather than a document, no setting will fix that; use Method 4.
What you get: a real document, with selectable text and clickable links, that looks like the print version of the site rather than the screen. Good for reading and archiving articles. Not good for anything that has to look the way it looked.
Method 2: Reader mode, for articles
If the article is buried in menus, ads and cookie bars, print it from Reader mode instead: in Chrome, the reading mode side panel (right-click the page, Open in reading mode); in Edge, Immersive Reader (F9); in Safari, Reader (Shift+Cmd+R); in Firefox, Reader View. Then Print to PDF. Reader strips the layout to text and images, so the PDF is clean and nothing is clipped. It only works on pages the browser recognises as an article, and it drops everything that is not the article.
Method 3: Safari's Export as PDF, one long page
On a Mac, Safari's File → Export as PDF writes the entire page as one tall PDF page instead of paper pages, so nothing is cut between pages and the layout is the screen layout. Links stay clickable. It still stops at panels that scroll inside the page, and it is Safari only.
Method 4: a PDF made from a screenshot of the page
When the PDF has to look like the screen, start from the screen. A full page screenshot extension scrolls the page, stitches every screen into one image, and writes that image into a PDF. Nothing is re-flowed, so nothing is clipped, backgrounds and dark themes stay, and a panel that scrolls inside the page is unrolled. These steps are for FullPage Capture, which we make.
- Install FullPage CaptureFrom the Chrome Web Store or Edge Add-ons. Free, no account, no watermark.
- Open the page and click the iconOr press Alt+Shift+K. The page scrolls and captures itself, exactly as you see it: backgrounds, dark theme, the state of any menus and filters, panels that scroll inside the page, sticky headers once.
- Choose PDFIn the result tab pick Full image for one long page, or Letter, Legal or A4, portrait or landscape. Page breaks fall between lines of text and links stay clickable. Optionally stamp the address and date on the pages. The file is written on your computer; nothing is uploaded.
Save this page as a PDF. Free, no account, nothing is uploaded.
Add to ChromeThe trade-off: the free PDF is a picture, exact but not selectable. FullPage Capture Pro adds an invisible text layer so the words can be selected, searched and copied in any PDF reader. Print to PDF gives you selectable text for free, at the cost of everything above.
Printing a whole webpage on paper
Everything above applies to paper too, because Chrome prints through the same dialog. For a clean printout of an article: Reader mode first, then Cmd/Ctrl+P, Background graphics on if you want the colours, Scale to Fit to page width, margins Minimum. For a page that must look like the screen, a dashboard, a design, a web app, export a PDF from the capture in Letter, Legal or A4 with page breaks between lines, then print that PDF: what comes out of the printer is what was on the screen, page by page, with nothing cut through a line. One long PDF page can be printed too, scaled to fit, when you want the whole page on a single sheet for a wall or a review.
Which method for which page
| Print to PDF (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) | FullPage Capture PDF export | |
|---|---|---|
| A plain article for reading | YesReader mode first if the page is cluttered | Yes |
| Looks exactly like the screen | No | Yes |
| Lines never cut between pages | No | Yes |
| Right edge never clipped | With Fit to page width, usually | Yes |
| Gmail, Notion, dashboards | No | Yes |
| Backgrounds and dark themes | With Background graphics on | Yes |
| One long page option | NoSafari only | Yes |
| Clickable links | Yes | Yes |
| Selectable text | Yes | Pro |
| Address and date on the pages | Header and footer option | Yes |
| Nothing to install | Yes | NoFree extension, no account |
Questions
Why does Save as PDF cut off the right side of the page?
The page is wider than the paper. In the print dialog set Scale to Fit to page width, or try landscape orientation. If it is still cut, the page uses a fixed-width layout the print stylesheet does not handle; a screenshot-based PDF sidesteps it, because it prints the pixels rather than re-flowing the page.
Why are lines of text cut in half between pages?
Print pagination slices the page at fixed heights and most sites do not tell it where a safe break is. Chrome has no setting for this. The extension's PDF export places breaks between lines by looking at the picture, so a line is never split.
Why does my PDF of Gmail, Notion or a dashboard stop after one screen?
Those apps scroll a panel inside the page, and printing captures the page element with the panel scrolled to wherever it was. No print setting reaches the rest. Capture the page with the extension, which unrolls the panel, and export that as PDF.
Can I save a webpage as one long PDF page instead of paper pages?
Yes. Safari's Export as PDF does exactly that on a Mac. In Chrome and Edge the extension's Full image option writes the whole capture as one PDF page, however long.
Will links still work in the PDF?
From Print to PDF, usually yes. From the extension, yes: every link on the page is placed in the PDF at the same spot, in the long page and in the paper sizes.
Will the text be selectable and searchable?
From Print to PDF, yes. From the free screenshot-based PDF, no, it is an exact picture. FullPage Capture Pro adds an invisible text layer to its PDFs so the words can be selected, searched and copied. What Pro adds
How do I save a webpage as PDF on an iPhone or Android?
On iPhone, take a screenshot in Safari, tap it and choose Full Page, then Save PDF to Files; or use the Share sheet's Print and pinch out on the preview. On Android, use the browser menu's Share or Print and choose Save as PDF. Extensions do not run on phones.
Does the page go through a server?
Not with any method on this page. Printing, Reader mode, Safari's export and the extension all work inside your own browser. Online "URL to PDF" converters do send the address to a server, and they cannot see pages behind your login.
Try it on the page you are reading. Free, no account, no watermark. Nothing is uploaded.
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