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Is there a way to make Google Docs save a document as a PDF but without splitting it into multiple pages? I understand that sticking to a certain page size is important for printing, but for the PDF I'm making it's not necessary and even distracting to have multiple pages.

I can't simply use a larger standard page size such as Tabloid, as the amount of content would still result in multiple pages.

[2024-01] Google Docs now includes pageless mode however that doesn't seem to carry over to the PDF.

How can I convert a pageless Google document to a single page/pageless PDF?

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5 Answers 5

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Here's my workaround:

  1. From Google Drive export your document as a HTML web page
  • File > Download as > Web Page (.html)
  1. Use Sejda's HTML to PDF converter and the handy 'One long page' size option.

By default the page size is 'One long page'. Can change it under More options.

Sample Google Docs document converted to a long page PDF

If your Google doc contains images then when exporting to HTML you'll get a zip file. You can't upload a zip file to convert it to PDF, only the HTML file so it does't work great in that case.

Disclosure: I'm a Sejda developer.

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Google Docs conversion is usually more permissive than it's own menu's would suggest. Have Libre-Office spit out 3m (its' max) tall pages and convert. MS Word will not go beyond 22 inches. Here is the converted result template. Maybe if you tweak the internal structure of the ODT file (unzip the odt, edit the style.xml, edit pagesize, rezip) you might be able to stretch this even further.

As you mentioned and probably understand PDF is a Printer Definition file. This is more a PDF question (or a word processor question) than a Google Docs question. The disclaimers I would like to add... No wordprocessor should allow for what you are asking. PDF's are page based. Continuous scrolling (no on-screen pagebreaks) is and should be a viewer setting. But hey, because you shouldn't doesn't mean you couldn't. Right? Maybe you can change paper sizes in a PDF editor, like Acrobat.

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I just came up with a solution that includes images.

  1. From Google Drive export your document as a HTML web page File > Download as > Web Page (.html) If your Google doc contains images then when exporting to HTML you'll get a zip file.

(so far I'm copying from a previous answer).

  1. Unzip the file

  2. open the HTML web page with Opera browser

  3. right click > Save as PDF

(you may end up with some extra blank space on the side)

I noticed Opera browser saves as pageless PDF some pages from the web (e.g. newspaper articles), hence the solution. I do not know of any other browser that does this (if you do please share)

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You can go to File -> Page Setup and choose a larger Paper size. For my purposes I used Tabloid which is much larger than the default Letter.

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Here's a workaround I found that may work for other programs but I used Pages on Mac.

  • On Google Docs, Export to docx
  • Open the docx in Pages
  • Page Setup
  • Increase page height to accommodate content (8.5" x 20" for example)
  • Export to PDF.
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