Screenshots to PDF: one clean file from many captures, text still sharp

Turn the screenshots into 1 PDF

Karol Michał is reporting a bug with 9 screenshots of the steps that cause it. The job:

1. Add the screenshots. Drag them onto the tool, drop the whole folder, or paste: with the page open, press Ctrl+V (Command+V on a Mac) and the screenshot on your clipboard joins the list. On Windows, the Print Screen key puts the whole screen on the clipboard (Microsoft Support, “Copy the window or screen contents”, checked on 11 October 2026), so capture, paste, capture, paste builds the list in order.
2. Check the order. Pages follow the list. Up and Down move a screenshot 1 place, Remove drops one.
3. Pick the page. Paper: “Same as the picture” for a PDF that is read on screen; A4 or US Letter for a document. More on this below.
4. Click Make the PDF, then Download PDF. The result says “9 pictures stored losslessly”, and the file is named after the first screenshot.

On the laptop, 9 desktop screenshots of 1920 by 1080 pixels (1.12 MB of PNGs) made a 1.13 MB PDF in about 5 seconds.

Why the text stays razor sharp

Most screenshot tools save PNG files, and PNG is lossless. The converter keeps it that way: each screenshot is stored in the PDF with lossless compression, so every pixel of small interface text arrives exactly as it was captured. A 1920 by 1080 test screenshot of 121 KB became a 122 KB PDF.

The smudges people see come from a detour through JPG. JPEG compression is built for photos and blurs the hard edges of text. The same test screenshot saved as a JPEG at quality 85 was 495 KB, 4 times the PNG, and that size buys nothing but fuzzier letters. A phone screenshot showed the same pattern: 223 KB as PNG, 904 KB as JPEG. So keep screenshots as PNG the whole way, and if someone sends you JPG screenshots, convert them as they are; a JPG’s picture data goes in untouched, so the tool adds no further loss.

Same as the picture, or A4

Same as the picture makes every page exactly the shape of its screenshot. Nothing is scaled, so the PDF looks like the captures, and a viewer zooms it to fit the window. The page size comes from the resolution written in the file, or 96 dpi when it says nothing: a 1920 by 1080 screenshot without a resolution note becomes a page of 508 by 286 mm, the same screenshot marked 144 dpi a page of 339 by 191 mm. Both look the same on screen.

A4 or US Letter puts every screenshot on the same paper, scaled to fit. Choose this when the PDF goes to a printer, or must look like a report. With Orientation on Auto, a wide desktop screenshot gets a landscape A4 page, where it fills 297 by 167 mm (about 164 pixels per inch, sharp on paper), and a tall phone screenshot a portrait page, 137 by 297 mm. A 10 mm Margin keeps text off the paper’s edge.

Phone and desktop screenshots in one file

Mixing them is fine, but decide what the reader will see. With “Same as the picture”, a phone screenshot is a tall, narrow page next to wide desktop pages, and a viewer that fits each page to the window makes the phone pages look tiny or huge as you scroll. With A4 and Orientation on Auto, every page is the same sheet, turned to suit its screenshot, which reads better as a document. For a bug report read on screen, “Same as the picture” is usually right; for anything that is filed or printed, A4.

Ordering a capture series

Screenshots are usually named by date and time, such as Screenshot 2026-10-11 093012.png, so they sort into the order you took them. Drop the whole folder and the tool lists its files the way people count, with 2 before 10. When you pick files with Choose files, check the list: the order the browser hands them over is not always the name order. Any outliers move with Up and Down. Combining photos in the right order has more tricks for long sets.

Trimming taskbars and tabs

The cleanest place to crop is the screenshot itself: capture just the window or the region, or crop in the screenshot editor before saving. If the PDF is already made, Crop PDF can trim it: By margins takes the same number of millimetres off the Top, Right, Bottom and Left of every page, which suits a set of screenshots taken from the same screen.

What a screenshot PDF cannot do

• The text is a picture. Nobody can search, select or copy from it. If the PDF is evidence, a manual or anything someone will quote, run OCR PDF on the result to add a text layer, and see making a scanned PDF searchable for how it works.
• Crop PDF hides, it does not remove. It changes the visible area of each page; the full screenshot, notifications and open tabs included, is still in the file and comes back if someone resets the crop. If a screenshot shows something private, crop or black it out in the screenshot before converting.
• Screenshots do not shrink much. They are already compressed losslessly. A long series is usually small anyway; if it is not, Compress PDF keeps any picture with 64 colours or fewer lossless and says what it changed.

Everything runs on your device, so the screenshots, with whatever they show, are never uploaded. For the page-size choice in depth, see A4, Letter or fit to image; for every other picture format, Pictures to PDF.