Capture screen as PDF on Mac

Keyboard commands provide us the easiest way to capture screen on Mac. The screenshots will be saved as PNG files on our desktop. PNG is one of the most widely used image formats. Sometimes however you may want to save screen captures as other files or in a different format. In such case, you can convert the PNG files using an image editor. For example, you can convert PNG to PDF using Preview app on Mac. To do that, simply open the image in Preview, then go to the File menu, select Export as PDF. If you have many pictures, screenshots or other image files need to convert to PDF, changing the file format manually would be tedious. Today, we will show you how to change screenshot format to PDF from Terminal on Mac.

How to take PDF screenshot on Mac?

Open Finder on Mac, choose Applications from the left panel, then select Utilities > Terminal. Double click to open the Terminal in a new window. Changing screenshot format from PNG to PDF on Mac is easy. Just type the following command in Terminal and press return or enter on your keyboard to execute the command.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf

change screen capture format to pdf on mac in terminal

Change screen capture back to the default format

To change screenshot back to the default format, use following Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

Press enter or return on keyboard to complete the action.

Copy text from PDF

Just like those scanned PDF documents, the text from above captured screenshots can not be edited or copied. You will need to use a PDF editor which support OCR to extract text from the PDF. Follow this tutorial to copy text from scanned PDF using a third-party PDF editor.