Why we do not offer it
Rendering a web page means loading it: fetching its images, fonts and scripts from wherever they live. There are only two ways for a site like this one to do that. Either our server fetches the page for you — which means our server sees every address you convert, and often what is behind a login too — or the page’s own code runs inside our editor, which the editor’s security policy exists to forbid.
Neither is compatible with the promise that your documents never leave your device. So rather than weaken that for one feature, we point you at the tool that already does it without any of those compromises.
How to do it
- Open the page, then print it (Ctrl+P, or ⌘P on a Mac).
- Choose “Save as PDF” as the printer. On Windows, “Microsoft Print to PDF” also works.
- Under more settings, turn on background graphics if colours or shading are missing, and turn off headers and footers to drop the date and address from each page.
- For an article, switch to the browser’s reader view first. The PDF comes out as the text, without the menus and advertising around it.
For many pages at once
Chrome and Edge can print a page to PDF from the command line without opening a window, with the --headless and --print-to-pdf options. That suits a script that needs to archive a list of pages, and still happens entirely on your machine.