Google Chrome Canary Build Gets Print to PDF And Print Preview For Webpages

Google Chrome already supports rendering PDF files, thus eliminating the need of a standalone PDF reader application (e.g Adobe Reader) on your operating system. The browser can open PDF files from webpages and also from your computer’s hard drive, which is great.

Chrome has a “Print” option buried in it’s context menu which lets  you print a webpage on paper or use another printer installed on your operating system. However, there is no option to print a webpage as a PDF file if there is no PDF printer installed on your system.

Clicking the “Print’ option from Google Chrome’s right click context menu fires up the classic “Print” dialog box where you can choose the desired setting for the printer. So if you want to save a webpage as a PDF document from Google Chrome, either you have to install a separate PDF printer or use third party tools, browser extensions etc.

The good news is that Google Chrome’s latest canary build has introduced a sleek Print preview feature, which can be used to save webpages as PDF document directly from Google Chrome.

To use the “Print preview” feature, right click on any webpage and select “Print”. Chrome will open a print optimized version of the webpage in a new browser tab, where you can preview the style, color and other attributes of the webpage before deciding to print it.

You can either choose to print the webpage in Black and White, thereby saving money on printing costs or choose to retain all the basic colors used in the webpage. Another interesting thing to note here is that Chrome also suggests how many sheets of paper you will actually need to print a complete copy of the webpage on paper.

Since I have Adobe Acrobat installed on my system, I was able to print a webpage as a PDF document directly from Google Chrome. There is no need to install another PDF printer or a browser extension, as shown in the following screenshot:

Note: This feature works only in Google Chrome’s canary build and not in the latest stable channel of Google Chrome.