Browser license

With our web tool you can manually create high-quality PDF documents quickly from any URL in your browser and you can save your own default settings in our members area. Below you can review all the options that you can use with our latest software to do so.

Note that we also offer other tools that create PDFs from web pages automatically. We have a powerful API and a great tool to convert full websites into PDF, but for all our automatic tools you will need a business license. Please review our plans for automatic PDF creation.

Features

  • Quickly Convert web pages to PDF as they appear on your screen.
  • Set page size, margins, headers and footers and much more!
  • Apply watermarks or stamps and remove our branding.
  • Protect and encrypt your converted PDFs.
  • Use in any browser and with the browser extensions for PDFmyURL.

Options

The sections below describe all the options that you will be able to use and save in our members area. They will be used as defaults for all our automatic tools, such as the web to PDF API, our full website to PDF tool, the batch URL to PDF API and also in the browser addons, which will make your life a lot easier when you're surfing the web.

Page Settings

The table below shows the settings that you can change to control the page settings. These will determine the layout of the resulting PDF.

SettingDescription
Page sizePage size, such as A4, Letter etc. See the full list for details.
Custom sizeSpecify a specific page size in millimeters, inches or points. You can also use this to get a single long PDF of your entire webpage instead of one that's broken down in pages. When you want that then fill in only the width and we will determine the height automatically. We recommend a widht of 300mm in that case..
OrientationPortrait or landscape orientation
MarginsTop, bottom, left and right margin dimensions in either mm (millimeters), in (inches) or pt (points)

Conversion Settings

The table below shows the settings that you can change to control the conversion process. These will largely determine the contents of the resulting PDF.

SettingDescription
Optimize layoutOptimize the way your web page looks as a PDF, by adjusting fonts and colors and making sure static items on your webpage (such as headers, navigation bars, notices etc) only appear once.
Use print layoutUse the print friendly layout (CSS media type 'print') if the web page has one
Remove backgroundDo not show the web page background in the PDF
Remove hyperlinksDo not include hyperlinks in the PDF
Do not run JavaScriptConvert the page with JavaScript switched off
Block AdsAttempts to automatically block ads from appearing in the PDF

Scale Settings

The table below shows the settings that you can change to control the scaling of the website as it's converted. This will be especially helpful with responsive sites such as sites based on Bootstrap and other responsive frameworks.

SettingDescription
ViewportThe viewport that our engine will use to capture your pages. By default we use 1366*768.
Zoom LevelZoom into or out of a page before the conversion. Values from 10% to 200% are valid.

Output Settings

The PDF output can be generated in different ways. Please find the options below that you can use to influence this.

SettingDescription
Convert to grayscaleConverts the PDF to grayscale.
Compress for minimum sizeExecute a custom compression on the PDF to shrink it's size, while keeping the quality (almost) the same.

Page Completion Settings

Some webpages need more time to load, because of lazy loading or because of JavaScript that's still completing. With the normal settings these webpages may end up incomplete in the PDF.

For those pages we have the below two settings. In most cases you will be able to get all the content of a webpage in the PDF by using these.

SettingDescription
Wait TimeLet our software wait this amount of milliseconds after the initial page load so that your page can finish drawing.
Lazy Load ContentUse extra time to render content (usually images or graphs) that's "lazy" loaded via Ajax.
Try this is you get a blank PDF or a PDF with parts missing.

Header and Footer

The header and footer can be specified in HTML through a WYSIWYG editor. We also support extra parameters for dates and page numbers. Have a look at the extensive documentation.

Custom CSS

You can add or override CSS of the pages that you want to convert. In this way you can easily remove pieces from a page or make them look different and style them to your needs.

Watermarking and Stamping

You can use your own image as a watermark or stamp for the PDFs that you create. We treat watermarks and stamps as the same thing, essentially because we always place the image in the foreground. In case you use an opacity of 100% then your image will appear as a stamp, but otherwise it will look like a watermark.

SettingDescription
Image locationURL of the watermark image
PositionThe horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) position of your watermark
ScalingThe horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) scaling percentages for the watermark
E.g. use 200% if you want to appear your watermark twice as big
OpacityPercentage that specifies the opacity - 100% is fully opague and appears as a stamp
Rotation angleAngle of rotation between 0 and 360

Rights management

You can use the encryption (also known as PDF rights managements) settings from the table below in the conversion process. Just make sure that your version of Acrobat Reader (or other PDF reader) supports the level of encryption that you choose, so you can actually OPEN the resulting PDF!

SettingDescription
Encryption levelLevel of encryption of the PDF (from 40-bit RC4 to 256-bit)
User passwordPassword needed to open the PDF
Owner passwordPassword needed to adjust the rights management settings of the PDF
Disallow printingPrevent users from printing the PDF
Disallow content copyingPrevent users from copying content from the PDF
Disallow annotationPrevent users from annotating (commenting) the PDF

Options available for our older PDF creation software

In March 2021 we introduced version 5.0 of our conversion software. This is based on the very latest browser engines and will be our default conversion software. Previously released versions 1.7, 2.0, 3.0 (2018) and 4.0 (2020) will remain available and you can select those in the "Profile" tab in our members area. The older 1.7 and 2.0 versions have the following options in the members area that are not (yet) available with version 3.0 and up.

SettingDescription
Ajax timeYou can set the amount of time that our engine should try to wait to complete your Ajax calls and other JavaScript scripts. In a lot of cases this will help when you miss images or maps or other stuff that's loaded by scripts. Note that usually there will also be a noscript version of these pages so it may be better to switch off JavaScript altogether when you convert these pages.
Include table of contentsInclude a table of contents at the beginning of the PDF
Include bookmarksInclude bookmarks in the PDF for the <h1> through <h4> tags in the webpage
Remove imagesDo not include any images from the web page in the PDF