How to turn screenshots and diagrams into a PDF
- Collect the captures
Screenshots of worked solutions, graphs from a plotting tool, or figures from slides.
- Order them
The list order is the page order.
- Keep quality high
94 or above for anything with text in it.
- Create the PDF
One page per image, in order.
Why this matters for exam and study documents
A worked solution captured from a lecture recording, a graph from a plotting tool and a photograph of a textbook page can all become one revision handout with this - as long as you remember none of it is searchable afterwards.
What is kept, what changes, and what this will not do
Everything produced here is an image of a page. That is what makes it portable and what makes it unsearchable, and the two are the same property seen from different sides.
Kept
- Image proportions and content
- Sharp edges, at high quality settings
Changed
- Images are stored as JPEG inside the PDF, so PNG transparency is flattened onto white
- There is no text layer - the words in a screenshot are pixels
Limits
- Transparency is flattened onto a white background.
- The text in a screenshot is not searchable in the result.
Questions and answers
Why is my screenshot blurry in the PDF?
Either the quality setting is too low, or the screenshot itself is low-resolution and has been scaled up. Capture at full size, and keep quality at 94 or above.
What happened to the transparent background?
It becomes white. A PDF page has an opaque background, so transparency has to resolve to something.
Should I use this or JPG to PDF?
They share an engine; the difference is the defaults. This page starts with high quality and a margin, which suits screen captures. The photo page starts with settings that suit photographs.