youtube-transcript-to-pdf

Installation

Prerequisites

• Chrome 116 or newer (or a Chromium browser of equivalent vintage — Edge, Brave, Arc). Check at chrome://version.
• Node 20 or newer, only if you intend to run the tests or build an archive. Not needed to use the extension.

Install from source (unpacked)

This is the only supported install today. The extension is not on the Chrome Web Store.

git clone https://github.com/mithudso/youtube-transcript-to-pdf.git
cd youtube-transcript-to-pdf

1. Open chrome://extensions.
2. Turn on Developer mode (top right).
3. Click Load unpacked.
4. Select the cloned directory — the one containing manifest.json.
5. Pin Transcript to PDF for YouTube to the toolbar.

Chrome will show a “Loading unpacked extension” notice on each restart. That is normal for developer-mode extensions.

Verify it worked

1. Open any YouTube video that has captions.
2. Click the extension. The URL box should already be filled in, with “Detected the video in this tab.”
3. Click Get. Within a few seconds the preview fills with timestamped text. A background tab may briefly open and close — that is the transcript-panel strategy.
4. Click Download PDF. The file appears in your Downloads folder.

If step 3 fails, open the service worker console: chrome://extensions → the extension’s service worker link. See DEVELOPMENT.md.

Upgrading

git pull

Then click the reload icon on the extension’s card at chrome://extensions. A manifest permission change may require removing and re-adding the extension.

Uninstalling

chrome://extensions → Remove. This deletes the extension’s stored preferences. PDFs you already downloaded are ordinary files and are untouched.

Building a distributable archive

npm run build

Writes dist/youtube-transcript-to-pdf-<version>.zip, containing only the files Chrome loads. See runbooks/release.md.

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