Export

The editor has two places for the output. The panels beside the stage hold everything that decides what the file looks like, and the stage draws each choice as you make it. Extract, the green button at the right end of the toolbar, or ⌘/Ctrl + P, then writes the file at once.

The panels

A column of icons runs down the editor's right edge, and each opens a panel beside the stage. From the top:

• Output Format: the format, and then, for a PDF, the page layout, the page breaks, text in pictures and archiving; for Markdown or Word, what the crop holds and tidying; for CSV, the tables it will write; for PNG or JPEG, the pixel size, and for a JPEG its quality.
• Frame: padding, a border and a window.
• Stamp & Brand: the stamp, your logo and a name, and a watermark.
• Integrity: an integrity record beside the file, and what the page declares to cite it by, with a reference file beside the export.
• Sensitive Text finds what should not be shared and hides it; the editor guide covers it.
• Presets: your saved sets of choices, applied with one click (see Presets below).
• AI Assistant, last in the column: much of the above from a sentence, such as "A4 PDF with the stamp below", though not the pixel size, the JPEG quality, the border, the brand, the watermark or a preset; the editor guide covers it.

The icons have no names on hover; the panel each opens is headed by its name. The editor opens with the panel folded, so the stage has the whole width; the button at the top of the column unfolds it on Output Format, and an icon unfolds it on its own panel. With a panel open, click another icon to switch to its panel, and click the open panel's icon, or the button at the top of the column, to fold it away again; your choices stand either way. Inside a panel the choices come in groups, each with a title.

Each option is one line; hold the pointer over it to read what it will produce for the crop you have drawn: the page count, the pixel size, the paper dimensions, the scale. With Remember the last choices on in Settings, your choices carry over to the next capture; it is off at first, and a preset keeps a set of them under a name.

Format

• PDF. Text stays selectable and artwork stays vector. Only the text inside the crop is in the file: what the crop leaves out, a site's menu or a sidebar, is not there to be found by a search or picked up by a copy. For a raster capture the option's hint says instead that this PDF holds an image.
• PNG. Lossless.
• JPEG. Much smaller, and lossy. Its quality is a slider in the Output Format panel.

For an image the panel shows the pixel size the file will come out at, frame included.

Text in pictures

When the crop holds text that is a picture, the Output Format panel offers Text in pictures for a PDF: a capture that fell back to stitching screenshots is one picture, some maps, charts and document viewers draw their text into a canvas, a page's screenshots, charts and diagrams are often image files with words in them, and a picture or a scanned PDF you opened from disk is all picture. When Sensitive Text has already read an opened file, its text is reused. Recognize it, on this computer, the default, reads that text when you extract and lays it over the picture invisibly, so the PDF can be searched and the words selected and copied. It reads English, Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Italian, with nothing downloaded and nothing sent anywhere, and it takes a few seconds for a canvas or a picture, longer for a whole page or a page of many pictures. Recognized text can have mistakes, and it is not the page's own, which the panel says. Nothing under a blur, a redaction or an erase is read into the file. Leave it a picture skips it.

Markdown and Word

Markdown gives you the text of the crop instead of a picture of it: headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, code, tables and images, with links, bold and italics kept, and the page's title, address and capture time at the top. It is read from the page itself as it was captured, so what is in the file is what the crop holds, less any band you cut out. Images are inside the file, so it stands alone. The panel counts what you will get before you extract.

Word writes the same text as a .docx document to edit: headings in Word's heading styles, numbered and bulleted lists, tables whose header row repeats on every page, code, and the pictures. It is laid out on A4 with inch margins.

Neither is offered while a blur, a redaction or an erase is on the capture, because the text under it would be in the file. The frame, stamp, brand and watermark are drawn on a picture, so they are not in either, and the Frame and Stamp & Brand panels say so instead of offering them while one is chosen. Neither is offered for a file opened from disk, which has no page structure to write. Text a page draws into a canvas is not in it, and a table cell comes out on one line.

A table drawn without a table element is still a table when the page marks it as one (a data grid, or a pricing comparison built with table roles) or lays it out as a CSS grid of short cells. A data grid that scrolls inside itself gives the rows it was showing, and a check mark with no name comes out as an empty cell.

A discussion thread keeps its comments apart. A comment in a list keeps its paragraphs and code under it, each reply at its depth, and a site that lays its thread out in tables, as Hacker News does, gives each comment as its author line and its paragraphs, with the code in code blocks rather than a table of one cell, each reply nested under the comment it answers.

Code a site draws inside its own components, as MDN draws its examples, comes out as code blocks too, and so does a code editor on the page, such as MDN's "Try it" box. A code block's label and buttons, when the page draws them, come out as a line above it.

Tidy decides what else goes in. As on the page keeps every block in the crop. Tidied by Chrome's model asks Chrome's own on-device model which blocks are the page around the article (menus, sign-in links, breadcrumbs, share and subscribe prompts, ads, cookie notices, "related" and "most read" lists, the footer) and leaves them out, and which short lines are section titles, and makes those headings. The model only picks blocks; every word in the file is still the page's. If it would leave out most of the page, nothing is left out. The message after the export says what it did.

It takes a few seconds for each screenful of text, and it is not perfect: on our test pages it found about nine pieces of furniture in ten, and very rarely took out a line of the article. It needs a Chrome that has the built-in model, or a model you serve on this computer, chosen in Settings › AI Model; the option then names that model. Where there is none, the Tidy group offers a small model to download and run in the browser instead, with its size on the button, and choosing the option before that shows a warning and the file is written as on the page. The first time, Chrome downloads the model, which can take a while; the export's message gives Chrome's percent when Chrome says one, and otherwise how long it has been downloading. The text never leaves your computer.

CSV

CSV writes the tables in the crop as spreadsheet files, to open in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets: one table gives a .csv, several give a .zip with a CSV for each, in the page's order. They are the tables Markdown and Word see, so a pricing comparison or a data grid drawn without a table element is there too when the page marks it as a table. The panel counts the tables and their rows and columns before you extract.

CSV is not offered when the crop holds no table, and not wherever Markdown and Word are not. A check mark with no name is an empty cell, a cell spanning several columns is written in the first of them, and a data grid that scrolls inside itself gives the rows it was showing. An agent or a script gets the same tables as JSON from the command line.

Archiving

A PDF can be made as PDF/A-2b, for archives, the ISO format libraries, courts and the public sector keep documents in. The file carries every font it uses, names its color profile and holds the metadata an archive checks for, so it opens the same in decades. It looks the same as the ordinary PDF, and it is up to half a megabyte larger for the fonts inside it. A text mark in Serif, Mono or italic becomes a picture of its words in such a file, with the words still selectable and searchable. An ordinary PDF is the default.

Links

A PDF keeps the page's links: a link to another site opens it, and a link to a heading further down the page jumps to the sheet it landed on. A link under a blur, a redaction or an erase is left out, because where it points can give away what the mark hides. PNG and JPEG are pictures, so they have no links.

Page layout

For a PDF, choose the paper.

• A4 pages, the default. 210 × 297 mm.
• US Letter pages. 8.5 × 11 in.
• Phone screen pages. 390 × 844 px, a phone's screen, with no margin: the crop is fitted to the width and cut into screens top to bottom, for reading the file on a phone. A capture at the phone width lands on it at 100 %.
• Single long page. One page exactly the size of the crop, with no margin and no scaling.

A4 and Letter keep a half-inch margin on every edge, scale the crop to fit the width inside it, and slice it top to bottom into as many pages as it takes. Each option's hint states the scale it applies and what that does to 16 px body text, in points, so you can see before you commit whether the result is worth printing. A desktop-width page shrinks a long way onto a sheet, and small print is the normal outcome rather than a fault; crop narrower if you want less of it.

If the shrink is the problem rather than the crop, it is fixed one step earlier: capture the page with Page width set to A4 or Letter and it is laid out at the sheet's width to begin with, so this hint reads 100 % and 12 pt. Getting started has that choice.

For the whole page as one long PDF page, with no sheets and no page breaks, choose Single long page. It is the most faithful output, and its hint gives the size in inches. It warns you past 200 inches, because some PDF viewers, Acrobat among them, cut off a page that tall, and no printer takes one. That is why the default is A4. A crop taller than 60,000 pixels comes out as several long pages of equal height, none taller than that, with the breaks drawn on the preview.

Where the page breaks fall

On A4, Letter or phone screen pages a sheet holds a fixed height of the page, and left to arithmetic the cut between two sheets lands wherever that height runs out, which on a page of text is regularly through the middle of a line. For page breaks that do not cut lines, keep Where the text allows, the default: Page Scanner reads the capture and moves each cut up, by at most an eighth of a sheet, to the widest gap it can find, so no line is sliced in half. That can cost one extra sheet and never more, and a page with nowhere quiet to cut keeps the arithmetic break. The hint says which it will be, and Every sheet the same turns it off.

Padding, a border and a window

In the Frame panel, all off by default. A capture is the crop and nothing else, so a white page pasted onto a white slide has no edge; the frame gives it one.

• Padding puts a margin around the capture, up to 96 px in steps of 8. Background under the slider picks what fills it (choosing anything but a color with no padding sets it to 48 px): a Color (white by default), a Gradient from eight swatches, a Wallpaper from ten desktop-style pictures made for Page Scanner (waves, beams of light, hills, petals, an aurora, dunes, and two quiet neutral ones), or a Picture you choose from disk (PNG, JPEG or WebP), cut to cover the margin. The picture is kept in the browser for the next capture, and the button beside its thumbnail removes it. macOS keeps its own desktop pictures as HEIC, which Chrome cannot open, so export one from Photos or Preview as JPEG first.
• Border draws a stroke at the capture's edge, up to 8 px, in a chosen color. Mid gray by default. It sits outside the capture, so it never covers anything.
• The swatch beside each slider opens Chrome's color picker.
• Window puts a title bar above the capture so it looks like a window: macOS, with the three colored buttons and rounded corners, or Windows, in the Windows 11 style, with minimize, maximize and close and rounded corners. It has a group of its own under the frame, and once there is a bar, the menu under it picks a Light or Dark one. The bar shows the page's site name, for example docs.pagescanner.app. With a border on, the border goes round the whole window; with padding on, the padding is the background the window sits on, which with a gradient or a picture looks like a window on a desktop.

The frame goes into the PDF, the PNG and the JPEG alike, and in the PDF it is drawn as vectors. On an image it adds to the pixel size, which the panel counts. On a single long page it adds to the page. On A4 or Letter it sits inside the margins on every sheet, so the page is scaled down to fit inside it: the scale in the page layout's hint falls as you drag, and the page cuts move with it. A window bar is on every sheet too, so each sheet looks like a window of its own.

Presets

If you switch between kinds of capture, say a bug report with a red arrow on A4 and a framed PNG for a slide, save each set of choices once and switch with one click. The Presets panel, the bookmark at the bottom of the rail's panels, lists your presets; click one and the pen, the text options and every choice in the panels change to it. Save asks for a name and keeps what the editor has now; the check saves it, and the cross (or Escape) closes the name box without saving. Saving under a name you already used replaces that preset. Point at a preset for a pencil that renames it and a bin that deletes it. Up to 20.

Bookmarks

A PDF comes out with bookmarks: every heading of the page inside your crop, nested the way the page nests them, each one jumping to the sheet it landed on. Open the viewer's sidebar to use them. Headings in the page's navigation, such as an "On this page" list or the footer, are left out, and a heading in Korean, Japanese or Chinese stays in that script. There is nothing to turn on, and a page without headings simply has no bookmarks.

Stamp the URL and the time

In the Stamp & Brand panel, off by default. Turn it on and the output carries a band with the page's address and the moment the capture was taken, so a file that has been printed, pasted into a document or handed on still says where it is from.

• Above or below the capture.
• The time can be the date (2026-09-20), the date and time (2026-09-20 17:40:23), ISO 8601, or left off entirely. The first two are your own time zone on a 24-hour clock; ISO is UTC, because that is the one you paste somewhere else.
• In a PDF the address is a link. Click it and the original page opens. An image cannot hold a link, so in a PNG or a JPEG it is text.
• On A4 or Letter the band repeats on every sheet and its height is taken out of the printable area, so no sheet comes out short. On a single long page, and on an image, the output grows by the band instead of the band covering the capture.
• A very long address is cut from the end rather than run off the edge.
• Colors are Light, white with gray text, or Dark, for a capture of a dark page.

It is a label, not a seal. It says what was captured and when the capturing machine's clock said it was; it is not proof of anything and is not meant to be.

An integrity record

In the Integrity panel, off by default (None). A record beside the file writes a second file beside the export, <name>.integrity.json, with the file's SHA-256, the page's address and title, a digest of the page's HTML as the scan found it, and when it was captured and exported by this computer's clock. When Clean up before capture hid anything, the record counts how many of each kind, so it says the file is not the whole page. A PDF carries the same details in its own metadata. The record, signed also signs it with a key made in this browser the first time you use it; the panel shows the key's thumbprint, which is what you give someone so they can tell your records from anyone else's.

To check a file later, with the record beside it:

npx @page-scanner/cli verify terms.pdf

or compare shasum -a 256 terms.pdf with the record's file.sha256 by hand.

What it shows is narrow: that the file is byte for byte the one exported, and, when signed, that whoever holds the key made the record. It does not prove the time, which is your computer's clock, or what the page showed anyone else. The key cannot be copied to another browser, and removing the extension removes it; records it already signed still check out. The second file is a second download, so Chrome may ask once whether the extension can download several files.

What the page declares to cite it by

Many pages say in their markup who wrote them, when, and where they were published: journals and repositories write citation tags for Google Scholar, news and blog platforms write schema.org data, and library and government pages write Dublin Core. Page Scanner reads these when it scans and puts them in the file: the PDF's document properties name the authors (and its metadata adds the date, the DOI, the publisher, the language and the canonical address), a Markdown file's front matter lists everything the page gave (author, published, publication, volume, issue, pages, doi and the rest), and a Word file's properties name the authors.

The Citation group in the Integrity panel shows what was found and where from. A reference file beside it also downloads a .ris file with the same name as the export, which reference managers import: the kind of work, the title, the authors, the date, the journal, the volume, issue and pages, the DOI, the address, the day you captured it, and the exported file's name. Where the page declares nothing, the reference carries its title, its address and the day.

This is what the page says about itself, copied as written. Nothing is looked up or checked, so a page with the wrong author or date gives a file with the same.

Many news and government pages declare a title and little else, and show the reporter and the date on the page instead: "김민수 기자", "입력 2026.09.25 14:30", "By Jane Doe". Where the page declares no author or no date, Page Scanner reads its byline and offers what it found under the declared fields, with Use these. Nothing of it goes into a file until you press that, so check it against the page first. A date after 수정 or Updated is never taken as the publication date.

A page you had translated

Chrome (and Edge) can translate a page before you scan it, and the capture keeps the translation as real, searchable text. So that nobody later quotes it as the author's words, Page Scanner notes it: the editor says so as the capture opens, the Citation group starts with "Machine-translated by Chrome before the capture", the PDF's Subject ends with the same, a Markdown file's front matter has translated: "Machine-translated by Chrome", a Word file's description says it, and a reference file carries it as a note. The language it was translated from and to is not recorded.

The page's language

Every PDF says which language the page is in, taken from the page itself, so a screen reader can read it in that language. A page that does not say is given the language Chrome detects in its text, on your computer, and text in its pictures is read with that language. Chrome detects it with the model its own translate feature uses, and only when that model is already on your computer; nothing is downloaded for it. A page written in two languages is given the one it opens with.

Your logo and a name

In the Stamp & Brand panel, off by default. Brand puts a logo and a name on the output, for a capture you send to a client or post in public.

• Pick where it goes: In the stamp band, at its start before the address, or a corner of the capture: top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right. In a corner it sits on a small white plate so it reads over any page.
• Type a name, up to 60 characters, and choose a logo: a PNG, JPEG, WebP or SVG file up to 5 MB. The logo is kept in the browser and used by every capture after this one, until you change it or remove it. Untick it to leave it off without forgetting it.
• With the stamp off, a brand in the band still adds the band, at the bottom, holding the brand alone.
• On A4 or Letter every sheet carries it.
• A name in Korean, Japanese or another script the PDF's standard fonts cannot draw is drawn as a picture of itself in the PDF. It looks the same, but you cannot search for it there.

A watermark

Type a word, such as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL, under Watermark and it is repeated at an angle across the capture, in gray at the strength you choose: Faint, Medium or Strong. On A4 or Letter it is laid across every sheet. In a PDF it is a picture rather than text, so searching or copying the page's text does not turn it up. It labels the file; anyone with a PDF editor can delete it, so it does not protect it.

See it on the stage

With A4 or Letter selected, the cuts are drawn straight onto the capture and numbered, so you can see which part of the page lands on which sheet before you export. They follow the printable area inside the margin, not the edge of the paper. A frame is drawn around the crop in its colors, and a stamp as a band above or below it reading what the file will read, and the brand and the watermark where they will be; the page outside them is dimmed, so the crop and what the file adds around it read together.

Extract

Extract is the green button at the right end of the toolbar, over the top of the stage, and ⌘/Ctrl + P or Extract in the stage's right-click menu does the same. One press writes the file the panels describe, as a download, with nothing to confirm. If it is not what you wanted, change the panel and extract again.

The message that confirms the download says what the file was made with, naming only what is on: for a PDF the page count and the paper, and PDF/A-2b when archiving is on; for an image its pixel size, and the quality for a JPEG; then the frame, the stamp, the brand and the watermark. A Markdown or Word file has none of these. If the capture was cut short, the message says how much is missing first. With When something is done turned off in the settings, there is no message.

Copy as PNG

To paste the crop straight into another app, press ⌘/Ctrl + C, or right-click the stage and choose Copy as PNG. It copies a PNG whatever format the Output Format panel has chosen, because Chrome's clipboard will not accept a JPEG or a PDF.

Quality

A JPEG's quality is a slider in the Output Format panel's Image group, from 40 to 100 %, set to 90 % by default.

After the second export

Right after your second export, a small card appears in the bottom-right corner of the stage, asking whether you are enjoying Page Scanner, and saying that a review on the store it came from (the Chrome Web Store, or Edge Add-ons in Edge) would be an encouragement to keep building. Write a review opens the listing's reviews page in a new tab; the close button puts the card away. It does not time out, and once you close it it does not come back. The count is kept in the browser's own storage and is not sent, and whether you reviewed is not recorded. Each export is counted in the usage statistics, unless you turned them off.

The file name

The page's title, or its address when it has no title, followed by the date and time of the export and the format's extension. Letters and digits are kept in whatever script the title is in, so a page titled in Korean or Japanese gives a file named in Korean or Japanese; spaces and punctuation become hyphens.