When PDF is the right choice for archiving a web page
Three cases: (1) you need the visual record — the layout itself matters as evidence, design reference, or because the page's appearance is the point; (2) you're sharing with someone who wants a self-contained document they can email and print; (3) the recipient doesn't use Markdown and expects a "normal" document file. For these jobs PDF is the universal format every reader handles.
When PDF is the wrong choice
Three cases: (1) you want to edit or extract the text content later — PDF is read-only and recovering clean text is its own conversion problem; (2) you're building a searchable archive — PDF is searchable in name only, in practice ctrl-F across hundreds of PDFs is painful; (3) you're feeding the content to an LLM for analysis — PDFs cost more tokens than Markdown and the model reads them less accurately. For these jobs /convert/url-to-markdown is the better choice.
Belt and braces: save both
Common pattern for journalists, lawyers, and researchers: save the page as PDF for the visual record (admissible-looking, shareable, frozen), and as Markdown for the searchable, editable, AI-readable working copy. The two formats serve different purposes and together cover the full preservation workflow.
We're a Markdown tool — for the PDF→Markdown direction
Once you have a PDF and want the editable text back out, see /convert/pdf-to-markdown — that's our core tool. Markdown is the format we built the suite around; the PDF capture here is a complementary archival utility for the cases where PDF specifically is what you need.