Chrome Story

Print PDF As An Image Using Google Chrome

Google Chrome is getting a PDF printing friendly feature named “Print PDF as an Image”.

Note: This is currently available as a flag in the Canary version of Google Chrome and Chrome OS. If you do not have this option yet, check back after a few more weeks.

Why Print PDF as Image

According to Adobe, “problems can occur when you print a PDF file. For example, a PDF file can contain damaged content such as images or fonts that Acrobat cannot process during printing”.

Printing PDF as an image avoids any of that from happening. Printers handle images better than PDFs.

This option is part of Adobe’s Acrobat PDF viewer. Google Chrome has a built-in PDF reader. Now, Google is bringing this feature to Chrome’s PDF viewer as well.

How To Enable “Print PDF as Image” In Chrome

Currently, this feature is available behind a flag. Go to chrome://flags and look for “Print Pdf as Image”. The direct URL to access this flag is chrome://flags/#print-pdf-as-image.

Enable this flag and restart Google Chrome. Open up a PDF and go to the Print view (CTRL + P). Look for the checkbox that says “Print as image”.

Go ahead and try this out.

A Note About Chrome Flags

As all the Chrome flags go, this is an experimental feature. That means this feature may not be available on the stable version of Google Chrome for now. This also means that this feature might change its name, the way it looks or works before it graduates out of the “flag” status. It may even completely disappear if Google decides to drop that feature.

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4 responses to “Print PDF As An Image Using Google Chrome”

  1. PhistucK – Israel – Just a nut.
    PhistucK

    You forgot to mention why it is not a good option, though.
    1. Saving to PDF as an image might increase the file size of the PDF significantly.
    2. Images has a certain resolution, in pixels and are not scalable at all, you will see pixelated content if you print it on a larger surface and scaling (up or down) might hurt the legibility of text.
    3. Unless you employ some kind of an OCR solution (perhaps Acrobat Reader has one, though? I do not think so), you cannot search for, select or copy the text from the image.
    There are probably more arguments, but those are the main ones.

    Reply
    1. Dinsan – Bangalore, India – Digital Minimalist & Content Developer. Drinks Tea and writes Stuff (mostly about Chromebooks). My views are mostly copied from others.
      Dinsan

      Well, I think we are talking about two different things here. As I understand it, (I might be wrong!) the option is converting the PDF to image before printing it into paper. We are not talking about converting PDF into an image, like print to PDF is creating a PDF. This also might have its own issues though.

      Reply
  2. hsingh021
    Himmat Singh

    when i am printing from chrome as pdf logos are showing as box

    Reply
  3. Alex – israel – ask me what you want to know
    alex

    thanks for the instruction.
    i have unfortunately not found that flag.
    i wanted the text as image in order to paste it in a program that would not paste a pdf in the same place.

    Reply

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