exporter Chrome extension

The problem

Most "save as PDF" tools either upload the page to a server to convert it, or wrap a screenshot in a PDF, so the text can't be searched or copied. None of them let you pull out just the parts you care about, like three charts from a dashboard or a receipt without the sidebar, as a tidy document. I wanted a converter that makes real documents and never lets the page leave the browser.

Approach

1. 01Drove Chrome's own print engine through the DevTools protocol (Page.printToPDF), attaching the debugger for exactly one call and detaching it in a finally block, so the output keeps selectable text, real page breaks and vector graphics.
2. 02Exported picked elements by narrowing the input instead of cropping the output: one temporary stylesheet hides everything except the picks and forces a page break after each, so a single print call gives one page per element.
3. 03Tracked down the layouts that break pagination (min-height wrappers, aspect-ratio boxes, multi-column and flex ancestors) and covered them with Playwright tests against a real Chromium.
4. 04Added an html2canvas + jsPDF fallback behind the same interface for tabs where the debugger can't attach, with the popup explaining the trade-off.
5. 05Made privacy verifiable: no content scripts, activeTab instead of host permissions, sender checks on every message, sanitised filenames, and a build step that fails if the shipped bundle contains any network or remote-code path.