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Subtitles to PDF

Turn a YouTube transcript or an SRT/VTT file into a cleanly typeset PDF — paragraphs, speakers, times that open the video. Also Word, TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT.

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A transcript printed straight from captions is a column of fragments: a line every three seconds, cut where it fitted on the screen rather than where the sentence ends, with every line of YouTube's automatic captions appearing twice. This tool rebuilds it as a document. Captions are joined into paragraphs at speaker changes, pauses and sentence ends, sound tags such as [Music] can be dropped, and the time each paragraph starts sits in the margin — as a link that opens the video at that moment, if you add the YouTube address.

It reads what you can actually get hold of: the transcript copied from YouTube's "Show transcript" panel, or a subtitle file in SRT, WebVTT, SBV, TTML or YouTube's own XML and JSON. It does not download anything from YouTube — a web page cannot read another site's pages, and doing it through a server would break the promise that nothing passes through ours.

How it works

  1. Copy the transcript from YouTube's "Show transcript" panel, or load an .srt or .vtt file.
  2. Give it a title and, optionally, the video's address so the times become links.
  3. Choose a layout: transcript with times, a reading version, or every caption with its times.
  4. Download the PDF — or Word, text, Markdown, or a cleaned SRT or VTT.

What people use it for

  • Printing a lecture or a talk to read, underline and annotate away from the screen.
  • Handing round the transcript of an interview or a meeting recording, with times that lead back to the video.
  • Checking or translating a subtitle file line by line, with every caption's in and out times on paper.

Frequently asked questions

Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. The file is opened by JavaScript and WebAssembly running inside your own browser tab. It is never uploaded, there is no server-side processing and nothing is stored — closing the tab discards everything.
Can I just paste the YouTube link?
No. A page on one site is not allowed to read pages from another, so the link alone gives the browser nothing to work with, and fetching it through a server would mean your request passing through ours. Paste the transcript instead: under the video open the description, click Show transcript, select the text and copy it. The link is still worth adding — it turns every time in the PDF into a link to that moment.
Why is every line of my auto-generated captions there only once?
Because they are rolled up on screen: each new line pushes the previous one up, and YouTube's caption files repeat it. The tool recognises that pattern and keeps each line the first time it appears, so a sentence is never printed twice.
The captions have no punctuation. How are the paragraphs made?
From the pauses and the length. Where the captions are punctuated, a paragraph ends at the end of a sentence; where they are not, as with most automatic captions, it ends at a pause once it has reached a reasonable length. You can make paragraphs shorter or longer.
Which languages and scripts work?
Any language that uses the Latin, Cyrillic or Greek alphabet is set in the PDF. Scripts such as Chinese, Japanese or Arabic cannot be set with the fonts the PDF uses; the tool says so, and the Word, text and subtitle exports keep every character.

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