Every webpage is a mix of content you want and clutter you don't. Ads, navigation bars, cookie banners, social widgets, comment sections, related article links — they all end up in your PDF when you use Ctrl+P. Pretty PDF's content extraction engine separates the signal from the noise automatically, so your PDF contains only what matters.
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Pretty PDF's extraction engine identifies and strips away the elements that have no place in a clean document. These are the six most common categories of clutter that the engine removes automatically before your PDF is generated.
Banner ads, interstitial placements, sponsored post blocks, and ad-network iframes are all identified and removed. The engine detects common ad container patterns, known ad-serving domains, and sponsored content markers so none of them reach your final PDF.
Top navigation bars, hamburger menus, site-wide headers, and footer link blocks are stripped out. These elements are essential for browsing a website but serve no purpose in a document. Removing them often eliminates two or more pages of wasted space.
GDPR cookie notices, privacy consent overlays, and modal popups that cover page content are detected and removed. These elements frequently appear on top of the content area, and when printed via Ctrl+P they obscure the text underneath.
Share-to-Twitter buttons, Facebook like widgets, LinkedIn share bars, and floating social sidebars are all removed. These interactive elements are useless in a PDF and often introduce layout-breaking iframes and fixed-position overlays.
User comment threads, Disqus embeds, and discussion areas below articles are discarded. Comment sections can add dozens of pages to a PDF and are rarely the content you are trying to save. If you do need comments, switch to Full Page mode.
Recommended reading carousels, "you might also like" sections, sidebar widgets, and newsletter signup forms are all removed. These elements pad out the page count without adding to the content you came to save.
Removing clutter is only half the job. The extraction engine is equally careful about preserving the content and structure that make a document useful. Semantic structure is maintained throughout — headings remain headings, links remain clickable, and lists keep their hierarchy.
All body text, paragraphs, and heading levels (H1 through H6) are preserved with their original hierarchy intact. The heading structure flows naturally into the PDF template, producing a document with clear visual organization and a logical reading order.
Inline images, figure elements, and their associated captions are retained and properly positioned within the document flow. Lazy-loaded images are resolved before rendering so nothing appears as a blank placeholder in the final PDF.
Fenced code blocks, inline code spans, and preformatted text are preserved with monospace formatting and proper line wrapping. Long lines wrap cleanly instead of overflowing off the page edge, and indentation is maintained exactly as it appears on the original site.
Data tables are preserved with their column alignment, borders, header rows, and cell spacing intact. The template styling applies clean table formatting that is optimized for print, so columns do not collapse or overflow regardless of content width.
Bullet lists, numbered lists, and nested sublists maintain their hierarchy and indentation in the output PDF. Definition lists and checklists are also supported. The semantic list structure is preserved so the PDF reads the same way the original webpage does.
Pretty PDF does not use a single blunt filter. The extraction engine runs your page through three distinct layers, each designed to handle a different aspect of content identification and cleanup. Here is what happens between the moment you click "Generate PDF" and the moment your clean document downloads.
For eight supported platforms — GitHub, Medium, Stack Overflow, Notion, Dev.to, Substack, Reddit, and Confluence — Pretty PDF uses dedicated parsers that understand each site's unique HTML structure. These parsers know exactly where the content lives on each platform and what to extract.
The GitHub parser, for example, handles README files, issue threads, pull request discussions, wiki pages, and individual code files with proper syntax formatting. The Stack Overflow parser extracts the question and accepted answer while discarding sidebar ads and related question links. The Notion parser expands toggle blocks and resolves dynamic class names that would otherwise produce blank output. Each parser is purpose-built to produce the highest-quality extraction for its platform.
When you use the Chrome extension, it detects the current site and tells the server which parser to use. For platforms like Notion, Reddit, and Confluence that rely on client-side rendering, the extension also preprocesses the live DOM — expanding toggles, serializing shadow DOM content, and capturing dynamic elements — before sending the HTML to the server.
For all other websites — and there are millions of them — the engine uses trafilatura-based extraction. This is the same class of algorithms that power browser reader modes, tuned specifically for PDF output quality.
The algorithm analyzes content density across the page, measuring the ratio of visible text to HTML markup in each section. It identifies the main content area by looking for the largest contiguous block of high-density text. It detects article boundaries, scores page elements by their likelihood of being actual content versus site chrome, and assembles the extracted content into a clean, well-ordered document. Navigation bars score low. Article paragraphs score high. The engine keeps the high scorers and discards the rest.
After extraction, the content passes through a BeautifulSoup-based sanitizer that handles the fine details. This layer removes residual scripts, tracking pixels, hidden elements, event handlers, and potentially dangerous markup. It strips inline styles that would conflict with the PDF template, resolves relative URLs so images and links work correctly in the output, and normalizes the HTML structure so WeasyPrint can render it cleanly.
The result is a sanitized, well-structured HTML fragment containing only the visible content from the original page. This fragment is then wrapped in your chosen template and rendered into the final PDF.
The difference between a browser PDF and an extracted PDF is not subtle. Here is how page counts compare across four common content types when the extraction engine removes the clutter.
| Content type | Before (Ctrl+P) | After (Pretty PDF) |
|---|---|---|
| News article | 9 pages with ads, nav, and related links | 2 pages of clean article text |
| Blog post | 6 pages with sidebar, popups, and comment section | 3 pages of focused content |
| Documentation page | 5 pages with nav tree, breadcrumbs, and footer | 4 pages of reference content |
| Forum thread | 8 pages with UI chrome, user badges, and sidebars | 3 pages of Q&A content |
Page count reduction depends on how cluttered the original page is. Ad-heavy news sites typically see the largest improvement — sometimes a 75% reduction in page count. Documentation pages with minimal chrome see smaller but still meaningful improvements. In every case, the result is a tighter document that contains only what you intended to save.
Content extraction is not always what you want. Sometimes the "clutter" is actually content you need to preserve.
Article mode is the default because it produces the best results for the most common use case: saving an article, blog post, or documentation page as a focused document. But there are situations where you want everything on the page, not just the extracted content.
Full Page mode captures everything visible on the page without any content filtering. The template styling still applies — your PDF will have professional typography and clean margins — but no elements are removed. This mode is useful when you need to:
You can switch between Article and Full Page mode in the extension popup before generating your PDF. If you only need a specific section of the page, Selection mode lets you highlight exactly the content you want.
No more ads, no more clutter, no more wasted pages. Just the content you want, professionally styled.
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