Reading on a phone
Width 1400, quality 80. Small files, and text stays clear at normal zoom.
Scribd to PDF converter
Turn any public Scribd document into a single PDF file. This page explains exactly what you get — page order, resolution, text, and file size — so you can pick the right setting before you convert.
What the PDF looks like
ScribSave does not rebuild your document from scratch. It opens the same public viewer you would see on scribd.com, captures each page as it is displayed, and joins the captures in order. What you see in the viewer is what lands in the file.
| Property | What you get |
|---|---|
| Pages | The complete document, in the original order, not a preview. |
| Watermark | None. Nothing is overlaid on the pages. |
| Text | Not selectable. Scribd draws pages as images, so the PDF has no text layer at all. Why, and what to do about it. |
| Resolution | 800–2400 px wide. 1800 px suits most screens and keeps files reasonable. |
| Image quality | JPEG 50–95. 82 is a good balance; raise it for small print. |
| Page numbers | Kept as printed, so the file reads in the same sequence as the original. |
| File size | Typically 150 KB–3 MB for a normal document, depending on length and setting. |
| Format | A single .pdf containing every page. |
Choosing a setting
The two controls are width and quality. Width sets how many pixels wide each page is captured; quality sets how much compression the image suffers. They trade file size against legibility, and nothing else changes.
Reading on paper
Width 1800–2200, quality 85. Worth the extra megabytes for dense text.
Archiving
Width 2400, quality 92. The largest, most faithful file. Slowest to convert.
What can go wrong
A conversion fails when the document is private, removed, restricted, or long enough to exceed the size limit. The page tells you which of those it was rather than showing a generic error, so you know whether retrying is worth it. For the limits in force, see the features page.
What the file is like, by kind of document
The mechanism is the same for everything — a high-resolution picture of every page — so what changes is only how well that suits the document. This is the honest version of that.
| Document | How the PDF turns out |
|---|---|
| Reports, manuals, articles | Exactly what you want. Dense text reads well at the default setting; raise the quality if the type is small. |
| Theses and dissertations | Long, so it takes longer, and the result is the most useful kind of copy to have. Set it going and it will finish on its own. |
| Slide decks | Fine to read and to present from, though a slide that relies on animation is a single still frame, because a still frame is all that is captured. |
| Scanned or photographed pages | Faithful, but the source is already soft. A higher width setting cannot invent detail that was never captured, so OCR gives a better result here than a bigger file does. |
| Comics and manga | Good, since these are pictures to begin with. Page order and orientation follow the original. |
| Anything you want to search or copy from | This is where the format will not help you. There is no text in the file to search, and the reason is worth knowing before you spend the time. |
What to do with it afterwards
Print it, read it offline, file it, or send it to somebody who does not have a Scribd account. If you need it to be searchable, do not fight the PDF — the honest options are to run it through OCR or to find the original file, and both are explained here.
Ready to try it?
Paste a Scribd link above. If it is a document the public can see, you will have the whole thing in a single PDF in about a minute.