One of the few things I genuinely missed from Safari was its simple “Export as PDF” feature. When I looked for an extension on Chrome-based browsers (e.g. Vivaldi), I couldn’t find one that did it right. They either turned the page into a flat, unsearchable image, completely butchered the layout, or used external services, making it impossible to save pages behind authentication.
So, I built my own.
With a little help from Anthropic’s Claude AI, I put together this simple extension. It does one thing: saves a webpage as a PDF that actually looks like the original and keeps all the text selectable and searchable.
The good parts
- Real, selectable text: The text in the PDF is still text. You can copy, paste, and search through it, just like you’d expect. No more frustrating screenshots.
- Keeps the original look: It does its best to make the PDF look just like the webpage you’re on.
- One-click simple: There are no settings or complicated menus. Just click the icon and save your file.
- Private by default: It processes everything locally using the browser’s built-in engine. Nothing is sent to external servers, so your data stays on your device.
What makes it different from “Print → Save as PDF”?
- Web2PDF is tuned for layout fidelity and searchable text, aiming to match the live page as closely as possible with minimal fiddling.
- One click from the toolbar—no dialog gymnastics, or changing margin settings, pages, etc every time.
How to use it
- Add the extension to your browser.
- Go to the webpage you want to save.
- Click the little Web2PDF icon in your toolbar.
- Save the PDF. That’s it.
Install from source code
- Pin the icon and click it on any page you want to save.
- Download or clone the repo (GitHub).
- Go to
chrome://extensions/(orvivaldi://extensions/in Vivaldi) → toggle Developer mode. - Load unpacked → select the Web2PDF folder.
Get it here
You can grab the extension from the Chrome Web Store or check out the (very simple) code on GitHub.
