Getting started

Install

Add Page Scanner from the Chrome Web Store, or in Microsoft Edge from the Edge store, Edge Add-ons. It is the same extension in both, and it runs in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and other Chromium browsers.

The install opens a welcome page. Chrome and Edge put a new extension in the Extensions menu, the puzzle piece beside the address bar, so the page says how to pin the icon to the toolbar (Chrome's pin, Edge's "Show in toolbar") and shows the shortcut your browser assigned. If another extension already uses Alt+Shift+P, the browser leaves it unassigned, and the page offers Set a shortcut. Try it on the guide opens this page, to try the first scan on.

Capture a page

Open the page you want and click the Page Scanner icon in the toolbar, or press Alt+Shift+P. A small panel opens with one choice on it, Page width, and a Scan this page button. The button is already focused, so pressing Enter starts the scan. Point at the question mark beside Page width to read what the chosen width does.

The editor opens on the capture. The first time, a short tour points out the crop, the tools, the output and Extract; it can be shown again from the settings.

Capture one element

To capture a single table, chart or card, press Pick an element below the Or under the Scan button, or Alt+Shift+E on the page itself. A green outline follows your pointer and shows the element's size. Press ↑ to take in its parent instead, which is how you get a whole table from inside one of its cells, and ↓ to go back; click or press Enter to capture, Esc to cancel. The whole page is captured as usual, and the editor opens with the crop exactly on what you picked, so everything else works the same.

An element inside a box that scrolls on its own is captured only as far as that box shows it, and the editor tells you when that happened.

Map a whole site

Map this site, under Pick an element, captures up to 30 pages of the site you are on and draws them as a flow, joined by the links between them. It asks for access to that one site first and shows you the list of pages before it captures any. Map a site walks through it.

Record the steps of a task

Record steps, under Map this site, makes a guide of a task you click through once: a picture and a sentence for each click that changes the screen, with sign-in and ID fields covered, saved as one PDF. Record steps walks through it.

Scan how a page scrolls

Scan scrolling, under Record steps, scrolls the page by itself and makes a storyboard of it: the page cut into scenes, six frames each, with what moved said in words and how it feels when the scroll stops, saved as one PDF to hand to an AI coding agent instead of a video. Scan scrolling walks through it.

Capture several tabs into one file

Select the tabs first, the way Chrome selects tabs: Cmd-click (Ctrl-click on Windows and Linux) each tab's strip, or Shift-click to take a run of them. Then click the icon. The panel says how many are selected and the button becomes Scan 3 tabs. Each tab is captured in turn, and the badge counts them.

The editor opens on one capture holding every tab, top to bottom in tab order, each under a band with its page title. A PDF gives each tab pages of its own, with a bookmark named after it, and with the stamp on, each tab's pages carry that tab's own address. An image export is all of them in one picture.

It takes two to ten tabs from one window. If one of them cannot be scanned, a chrome:// page for instance, the panel's scan stops and the page tells you which tab it was, so you can leave it out and try again. Picking one element is not offered with several tabs.

A file per tab, for research

In the Output Format panel, a capture of several tabs has a Tabs group. A file per tab, in a ZIP makes Extract write one ZIP instead of one document. Inside it:

each tab as a file of its own in the format you chose, with its text beside it as Markdown, and each cited as that tab's page declares;
references.ris, a reference per tab for a reference manager, pointing at its file;
index.md, which lists the tabs with their addresses and each file's SHA-256;
SHA256SUMS, so shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS in the unzipped folder says whether any file changed since.

A tab your crop leaves out is left out of the ZIP. Your marks and every other choice in the panels apply to each file as they would to the one document.

Page width

This is the one thing that has to be decided before the scan, because the capture lays the page out once and everything after that comes from the same layout.

The window, as it is is the default and is what you see on screen. On A4 or US Letter the capture is then scaled down to fit between the margins: a 1280 px window comes out at 55 %, which puts ordinary 16 px body text at 6.5 pt.
Narrowed to A4 lays the page out 698 px wide first, the way it would look if you dragged your window narrow. It then fits A4 with no scaling at all, and the same body text comes out at 12 pt. Narrowed to US Letter does the same at 720 px.
Narrowed to a phone lays the page out 390 px wide, as a phone's screen shows it, so a responsive site shows its mobile layout. For a PDF, Phone screen pages in the export then cuts it into phone-sized pages at 100 %.

Narrowing only works as far as the page's own CSS allows. A page built around a fixed-width table stays as wide as that table, and the size under the page's title, in the editor's top-left corner, tells you what width you actually got.

The choice is remembered, so the next scan is the icon and Enter. Everything else a scan can be told is in the settings, behind the gear in the panel.

Say how to scan, in the side panel

The button left of the gear, with the Assistant's icon, opens the browser's side panel beside the page. Say there how this page should be captured, in a sentence, in any language: "A4 width, without ads or cookie banners", "다크 모드로", "折りたたみを全部開いて". The two examples in the empty conversation are a start: a click sends one. The model of the editor's Assistant, on Page Scanner's server, reads it and sets what the scan decides before it starts: the width, the clutter hidden first and what is kept, folded sections, the color scheme, videos, and whether you pick one element first.

Where the request needs it ("make it clean for printing"), the Assistant looks at the page first: it counts the ads, cookie banners, chat widgets and pop-ups the scan would hide, and sees whether the page has a dark version, how large it is and how many sections are folded. It gets those counts, never the page's text. Nothing on the page changes while it looks. It then says in a sentence what the scan will do, and what it set waits above the box, headed "Scan with these choices?". Press Scan (⌘/Ctrl + Enter) to scan with it, or Reject (Esc in the empty box). A second request while it waits adds to it: "and in dark mode" after "A4" keeps the A4. Nothing is scanned until you press Scan, whatever the sentence says; with one element in the plan, the button reads Pick, then scan. A request for what the editor decides after the scan, such as the format, the stamp or hiding sensitive text, gets an answer that the editor does it, and nothing is set.

The editor then opens as usual, with its Assistant up and your conversation in it, so you can go on telling it what to do with the capture. The side panel closes as the editor opens.

What you say holds for this scan only; the settings stay as they were. Every message is read by Page Scanner's server, which is sent the conversation, the scan's choices and the counts above. The panel shares the Assistant's 10 messages a month, its 8 steps a message and its switch in Settings › AI Model. With that switch off, or the panel opened any other way than from the popup, it says so in its middle and takes no request. The panel scans the tab it was opened for. The button is not there over the editor, which has its own Assistant, or for several selected tabs. It is a preview, badged Preview.

The panel takes its width from the window, so The window, as it is lays the page out at the width left beside the panel. Choose A4 or Letter there, or close the panel and scan from the popup, for the page at the window's full width.

Open a picture instead of a page

The third button in the panel, Open a PDF or image, opens an empty editor beside the tab. Drop a PDF, a PNG, a JPEG or a WebP on it, paste a picture from the clipboard, or press Choose a file, and the editor opens it as if it were a capture: crop it, mark it up, look for sensitive text and redact it, and export it as a PDF, a PNG or a JPEG. The file is read in that tab and is not uploaded anywhere.

A PDF's pages are laid one under the other on a gray sheet, and its text stays text. It opens on Single long page, which writes its pages back out as they were, each at its own size, a landscape page landscape. What you typed into a PDF form stays; comments, highlights a reader drew and links do not come across. A password-protected PDF cannot be opened: open it in Chrome, print it to a new PDF, and open that. A very long PDF opens on as many pages as fit, about 51 A4 pages, and the pages after those are left out without a note in the editor.

The picture's size comes from the resolution written into it. A Retina screenshot, which says 144 dpi, opens at half its pixel size, the size it was on screen; a 300 dpi scan of an A4 page opens A4 wide. A picture that says nothing opens a pixel to a CSS pixel.

A picture has no text of its own, so its PDF holds an image. A scanned PDF is the same: its text is a picture of text. Markdown and Word are not offered for any file opened this way, a PDF with real text included, since there is no page structure to write, and the stamp shows only the time the file was opened, since there is no address.

Only a PDF, a PNG, a JPEG or a WebP opens; a GIF, a HEIC and anything else is refused by name. A picture can be at most 32,767 pixels on a side and 90 million pixels in all. Over an editor holding an opened file, the panel offers Open a PDF or image again rather than a rescan.

Scanning the same page again

A scan leaves the editor tab in front, so pressing the icon again lands on the editor rather than on the page. The panel notices and offers the page that editor came from: it reads Again followed by the page's title, and the button becomes Scan it again. That is how you take the same page at a different width without hunting for the tab.

If you have closed that tab or moved it somewhere else in the meantime, the panel says so instead of scanning something you did not mean.

While it runs

The panel stays open while the scan runs: its choices give way to a large green scanning animation over the line Scanning this page. The icon's badge follows the scan while it measures the page, lets it settle, captures it and builds the PDF, and keeps following it if you click away, which closes the panel without stopping the scan. If the scan fails, the panel comes back with the reason. When it finishes, an editor tab opens right next to the page you scanned, holding the whole page from the top of its scroll to the bottom.

Before the capture, ads, cookie and consent banners, chat widgets and pop-ups are hidden, and put back on the page afterwards. When anything was hidden, the editor says what in a toast, with a Capture settings button (unless that notification is off in the settings). Turn the switches off in the settings when you want the page exactly as it looked.

While a scan runs, Chrome shows a bar that reads "Page Scanner: Full Page Screenshot" started debugging this browser. That is Chrome's own notice for any extension using its debugger. Chrome takes it down five seconds after the scan lets go of the page, which is why it is often still up as the editor opens, and no extension can hide it or take it down sooner. The editor says as much in a small card by its toolbar while the bar is up, and the card goes with the bar. Why the debugger explains what it is used for.

One scan runs at a time per tab. A second request while one is running is ignored.

Vector or raster

A raster capture is not labeled in the editor; the PDF option in the Output Format panel says that its PDF holds an image. A vector capture needs no note.

Vector is the normal case. The PDF holds real text you can select, search and copy, and artwork that stays sharp at any zoom.
Raster is the fallback when Chrome's debugger cannot attach to the tab, most often because DevTools is already open on it. The page is scrolled a screen at a time and the pieces are stitched together, so the PDF holds an image. Close DevTools and scan again to get a vector capture.

What it can touch

It asks for no host permissions. It reaches a page only when you click the icon or press the shortcut on it, when you select several tabs and scan them together, or when a script or agent you connected asks it to. Connecting asks for two optional permissions, to talk to Page Scanner's helper and to manage tab groups; see Local agents.

A capture is kept in the extension's own storage inside your browser, and is deleted the next time the extension starts if it is more than 12 hours old. There is no account, and no capture, mark or exported file is uploaded. Page Scanner's server reads what you say to the Assistant and the side panel, with their choices and counts, and never sees the page. The extension does send anonymous usage statistics, which features were used and never which page, and Settings turns them off. The privacy policy, linked at the top of the sidebar, has the details.

Crop, zoom and pan in the editor.
Export a PDF, a PNG or a JPEG.