Screenshots are quick but limited. PDFs are searchable, selectable, accessible, and printable. Here's when each makes sense -- and why PDFs are almost always the better choice for saving web content.
Free tier -- 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Screenshots capture pixels -- a visual image of what's on screen. PDFs capture content -- structured text, images, and formatting in a reflowable document. Both preserve web content, but in fundamentally different ways with very different capabilities.
A screenshot is essentially a photograph of your screen. It records the exact appearance at a single moment, but throws away all the underlying structure. The text in a screenshot is just colored pixels -- you can't select it, search it, copy it, or reflow it. A PDF, by contrast, stores the actual text characters, preserves links and headings, and can be paginated, annotated, and printed at any size without quality loss.
This difference matters most when you want to use the content you've captured -- not just look at it.
Every capability, side by side. See exactly where screenshots fall short and where Pretty PDF delivers.
| Feature | Screenshots | Pretty PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Text searchable | No -- image pixels only | Yes -- full-text search |
| Text selectable / copyable | No -- requires OCR | Yes -- select, copy, paste |
| Accessible (screen readers) | No -- no semantic structure | Yes -- text and heading structure preserved |
| File size for long pages | Very large -- scales with page length and resolution | Compact -- text-based with optimized images |
| Print quality | Fixed resolution -- blurry when scaled | Vector text -- sharp at any size |
| Pagination | Single long image | Proper pages with page breaks |
| Editable / annotatable text | No -- draw on image only | Yes -- highlight, comment, annotate text |
| Link preservation | No -- links are just pixels | Yes -- clickable links preserved |
| Template styling | No -- captures page as-is | 5 professional templates (Clean, Minimal, Corporate, Academic, Dark) |
This is the biggest difference. A screenshot is an image -- you can't search for a word, copy a paragraph, or highlight a sentence. A PDF contains structured text that's fully searchable, selectable, and copyable. For research, reference, or archival, searchable text is essential.
Consider a common scenario: you've saved 20 web articles for a research project. With screenshots, finding a specific quote means opening each image and visually scanning through them. With PDFs, you press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F) and type the word you're looking for. Your PDF reader searches across documents instantly.
The same applies to copying. If you need to quote a passage from a saved article, a PDF lets you select and copy the text directly. With a screenshot, you'd need to retype it manually or run it through OCR software -- which introduces errors, especially with technical content, code snippets, or non-English text.
Full-page screenshots of long articles create enormous single images -- potentially 10,000+ pixels tall. They're unwieldy to scroll, can't be printed at readable size, and file sizes balloon with resolution. PDFs paginate naturally -- a 20-page article becomes a 20-page PDF with proper page breaks.
A full-page screenshot of a long technical article might produce a PNG file that's 1440 pixels wide and 15,000 pixels tall. At high DPI (2x for Retina), that's a 2880 x 30,000 pixel image. The file size can easily reach 20-30 MB for a single article. The same content as a Pretty PDF is typically 200-500 KB -- 50 to 100 times smaller.
Printing is another problem. That 15,000-pixel-tall image either gets shrunk to fit a single page (making the text microscopic) or printed across multiple pages with arbitrary cuts mid-sentence. A PDF has intelligent page breaks that avoid splitting paragraphs, headings, and images awkwardly.
Screenshots are inaccessible to screen readers and assistive technology -- they're just images with no semantic structure. PDFs preserve text, headings, and reading order. For organizations with accessibility requirements (and for basic good practice), PDFs are the accessible format.
A screen reader encountering a screenshot sees a single image element. Without alt text (which screenshot tools don't generate), the content is completely invisible to visually impaired users. A PDF, by contrast, contains the actual text content that screen readers can parse, navigate by headings, and read aloud.
This matters for compliance too. Organizations subject to WCAG, ADA, or Section 508 requirements need to share content in accessible formats. Distributing information as screenshots fails accessibility standards. PDFs with structured text meet the baseline requirement for text accessibility.
Screenshots do have valid use cases where they're the right tool for the job:
For everything else -- reference, archival, research, printing, professional sharing -- PDFs are the better choice. They preserve the content in a format that's searchable, accessible, compact, and designed for long-term use.
Install Pretty PDF and get searchable, accessible, professionally styled PDFs from any webpage. Free tier included.
Install Free Extension