YouTube Video to PDF Converter

The video’s title, channel and thumbnail at the top with a link back to it, then the full transcript in paragraphs — cut at sentence ends when the captions have punctuation, on length and pauses when they do not — with a timestamp beside each paragraph if you keep that on. Every page carries the title and its number. Text is real text, so it is selectable and searchable, not a picture of words.

The transcript. A PDF is a document, and the readable part of a video is what is said in it — that is what people want to read, print, search and quote. The thumbnail is included on the cover so the file is recognisable in a folder, and the link takes you back to the video whenever you want the pictures.

From YouTube. If the uploader published captions, you get those; if not, the auto-generated ones YouTube makes for most videos. Auto captions are usually good but not perfect — expect the odd misheard name and no punctuation, which is why paragraphs in that case are cut on length and pauses instead of at sentence ends. The result tells you which kind you got.

Then there is nothing to convert, and the tool says so. That happens with some music videos, very new uploads that YouTube has not processed yet, and videos whose uploader switched captions off. Live streams get a transcript once the replay is processed.

The tool asks for English first and, if the video has none, takes the first language YouTube lists. The PDF is drawn with fonts that cover Latin script — English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and the rest — so a transcript in Japanese, Hindi or Arabic cannot be drawn yet, and the tool says so instead of printing boxes.

Two things, and both redraw the file on the spot: timestamps on or off, and the text size — compact fits more on a page, large is easier on the eyes and on paper. Everything else is set so the document looks the same for everyone: A4 portrait, one clean typeface, generous margins.

No. A three-hour podcast becomes a thirty-odd page PDF; it just takes a second or two longer to draw. The file is plain text with one small image, so even a long one is a few hundred kilobytes.

The link is sent to our server so it can fetch the captions from YouTube for you (browsers cannot read YouTube directly). The transcript is cached for a week so a popular video is not fetched over and over. The PDF itself is drawn in your browser and never uploaded anywhere.