Print-cleaning extensions let you manually remove page elements before printing. Pretty PDF automatically extracts the content, applies professional templates, and saves to a cloud library. The difference is automation vs manual work.
Free tier -- 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Print-cleaning tools -- PrintFriendly, Printliminator, CleanPrint -- work by letting you click on page elements to remove them. Click on an ad and it disappears. Click on the sidebar and it disappears. It's intuitive but tedious: you're manually cleaning every single page, every single time.
Pretty PDF takes a fundamentally different approach. Its extraction engine does this automatically, using content analysis to identify the main article or document and discard everything else -- ads, navigation, sidebars, comment sections, cookie banners -- without any clicks. The server-side engine analyzes the page structure, identifies what's content and what's chrome, and extracts only what matters.
The distinction is simple: print-cleaning tools give you a broom; Pretty PDF gives you a self-cleaning room.
Every capability, side by side. See where manual cleaning falls short and where automatic extraction delivers.
| Feature | PrintFriendly / Printliminator | Pretty PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Content extraction | Manual click-to-remove | Automatic AI extraction |
| Per-page effort | 2-5 min clicking | One click |
| Templates | None or basic | 5 professional templates |
| Site-specific parsing | No | 8 platform parsers |
| Cloud storage | No | Cloud library |
| Full-text search | No | Yes |
| Custom headers/footers | No | Yes (Pro) |
| API / automation | No | Full REST API |
| Batch processing | No | API-powered |
On a single cluttered news article, manually removing ads, navigation, sidebar, comments, and footer takes 2-5 minutes of clicking. You hover over each element, confirm you want to remove it, and repeat for every piece of page chrome. Pretty PDF does it in one click.
Across 10 articles per week, that's 20-50 minutes of saved manual work. Over a month, you're looking at 1.5-3.5 hours spent just removing page elements -- work that automatic extraction eliminates entirely.
The automation compounds. The more pages you convert, the larger the gap between manual removal and automatic extraction. For anyone who regularly saves web content as PDF, the time savings alone justify switching from a click-to-remove tool to automatic extraction.
Print-cleaning tools produce output styled however the remaining page elements happen to look. Once you've clicked away the ads and sidebars, you're left with whatever CSS the website applies -- inconsistent, unbranded, and unprofessional. Different sites produce wildly different-looking PDFs, and none of them look intentionally designed.
Pretty PDF applies consistent professional templates to every document. Choose from Clean for articles and blog posts, Minimal for notes and references, Corporate for business documents, Academic for research and papers, or Dark Mode for developer content. Each template uses embedded fonts (Fraunces headings, Instrument Sans body) with proper page margins, line height, and typographic hierarchy.
Every PDF looks intentional, whether it's a news article, a technical doc, or a business report. The same template produces visually consistent output across any source website.
Print-cleaning tools solve exactly one problem: removing unwanted elements from a page. That's useful, but it's only the first step in producing a quality PDF. Pretty PDF goes further with a complete feature set:
Print-cleaning extensions stop at element removal. Pretty PDF is a complete web-to-PDF pipeline.
Manual removal tools have their place. They work well in specific scenarios:
For regular, repeated use across many pages -- saving articles, archiving documentation, converting research -- automatic extraction is more efficient. The time savings compound with every page you convert.
Install Pretty PDF and get clean, professionally styled PDFs from any webpage -- automatically. Free tier included.
Install Free Extension