Save or Export a Webpage as a PDF

Did you know you could save a webpage as a PDF in Safari on the Mac? When you do this, it saves the entire webpage, not just what is shown on your Mac. You do this by Exporting it. You can also print a webpage as a PDF (or print any other document as a PDF) and when you do this, you can add security and meta data to the PDF. See how easy it is to save or export a webpage in this video forSafari on the Mac.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can save a webpage as a PDF with Safari on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m in Safari here and I’m looking at this document on macOS Monterey. This is a lengthy document, actually, it’s a webpage. It’s a lengthy webpage. You can see we have quite a bit of information in this webpage.

Now, what I would like to do is save this as a PDF. So then I can view it at a later date, view it in the Preview app, as an example. How do I save this entire webpage as a PDF? Well, there are a couple of ways to do it.

When you’re in Safari, all you have to do is just go up under File in the menu bar, and then we go over to Export as PDF. I select this, and then I select where I want to save it. I’m going to go with my Desktop. I click on Save, and now we have my document, my PDF document.

And what it did is it saved to the entire web page as a PDF document. I’m going to double click on this. It opens up in the Preview app and we can see we have the entire web page. I can keep scrolling to view all of the different information about macOS Monterey.

Now I mentioned that we have a couple of different ways to do that. Another way is through the Print dialog box. Let’s go back over to Safari, I quit out of here and now we’re back in Safari.

To save this as a PDF, we go up under File, and then we go over to Print. Under print. We have an option for PDF. I select this, and then I go to Save as PDF. And again, I select where I want to save it, and I click on Save.

Now, why would I want to use this method as opposed to exporting it as a PDF? If I use this method, what I am able to do is add security options. I can add a pass code to it. I can also add subject and keywords, as well as the author. You can’t do this when you export it as a PDF, using Safari, but if you print it as a PDF, you do have more options. But in addition to that, I can use the same method to export any document into a PDF. I could open up an Excel spreadsheet. I go to print. I can save that as a PDF. I go to Pages. I can save that as a PDF. I go to Microsoft Word. I can save any document as a PDF. I go to Google Chrome, if I use Chrome as my main browser, I want to save a webpage as a PDF. I can do that as well, just by printing it and then saving it as a PDF. So this method through the print dialogue box does give you a few more options and you can use it for more than any app that prints.

But if you just want to quickly save a page, a webpage as a PDF and I’m using Safari, you can also just go up to Export under File, save it as a PDF or export it as a PDF.

So that’s how you can export a webpage as a PDF in Safari, as well as export any other documents as a PDF on the Mac.