The recording is the documentation

You recorded the process once. Then someone asks for it "as a doc" — and the usual answer is to do the whole thing again in a click-tracking tool, or to paste screenshots into a page by hand. ScreenTailor's editor has a Step-by-Step Guide mode instead: capture the frames that matter from the recording you already have, and export them as A4 pages — PDF or PNG.

Nothing to record twice

Tools like Scribe and Tango build a guide by watching you click through the process — a second pass, in a second tool, that has to stay in sync with the video you made. ScreenTailor starts from the opposite end: the video is the source. Flip the toggle at the top of the editor from Edit to Step-by-Step Guide, and the same recording, the same trims and the same annotations produce the still pages. The guide and the video can't drift apart, because they came from the same frames.

Captions become steps

If you already captioned the recording — "Open Settings", "Paste the key", "Save" — you're one click from a draft. From captions generates a step for each caption, capturing the frame at the moment that caption is on screen, in order. The narration you wrote for the video becomes the labels in the document.

No captions? Scrub the seek bar and press Capture step wherever the screenshot should be. Either way, steps are reordered by dragging them and removed with one click, so the draft is quick to trim down to what a reader actually needs.

Your edits come with the frame

Each step is captured from the edited preview, not the raw video. That means a step is a finished figure the moment you take it:

• Zoom — the page shows the menu item you zoomed into, not a 27-inch desktop with a cursor lost somewhere in it.
• Blur and spotlight — the customer data you blurred in the video is blurred in the document too. It never existed as a clean pixel in either output.
• Captions, arrows and highlights — already in the image, styled the way you styled them once.

It's the same idea as annotated screenshots, scaled up: instead of copying one decorated frame to the clipboard, you collect a run of them and lay them out as a document.

Pages, PDF and PNG

Steps flow onto A4 pages in the layout you pick — landscape, one per page (the default, which suits 16:9 screen captures), portrait one-up, or portrait two-up when you want a denser handout. Pages are numbered, images are fitted without cropping or stretching, and the preview beside the video is exactly what you get.

Export a single PDF to hand to someone, or the pages as PNG files to drop into Notion, Confluence, a wiki or an email. Both land next to the recording, so the video and its written version live together.

What it doesn't do

Two limits worth knowing before you download, rather than after:

• Steps are images, not text blocks. There's no per-step body field to type into — the wording lives in the captions you burn into the frames. If your document needs long paragraphs between screenshots, export PNG pages and write around them.
• The PDF isn't searchable. Pages are embedded as images, so text in them can't be selected or indexed. In exchange, pages render identically everywhere, in any language, with no font substitution.

Part of a full editor

Step-by-Step Guide is a mode of the same built-in editor that does zoom, trimming, system audio balancing and Checkpoint Recording. One recording, one app: a share-ready MP4 and the written guide that goes with it — see it end to end in how to turn a screen recording into a step-by-step guide, or how teams use it for SOPs and internal documentation.

Frequently asked questions