Dark mode websites look great on screen but waste ink and can be hard to read when printed. Pretty PDF gives you two great options.
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Dark mode is everywhere. Developers use it in their IDEs, readers enable it on blogs and news sites, and many platforms now default to dark themes. But when it is time to save one of these pages as a PDF, things fall apart.
A dark background means your printer has to lay down ink or toner across the entire page. A single dark-mode article can consume ten times more ink than the same content on a white background, driving up printing costs and wearing out cartridges faster.
White or light-gray text on a dark background does not reproduce well on paper. Consumer printers often struggle with fine light text on heavy ink coverage, resulting in blurry, hard-to-read output that looks nothing like the crisp screen version.
When you use Ctrl+P on a dark website, the browser may attempt to invert colors for print. The results are unpredictable: some elements invert while others do not, images get color-shifted, and the overall layout looks broken and inconsistent.
Some browsers keep the dark background intact in the PDF output, creating a document that is uncomfortable to read on screen at high brightness and wasteful to print. The user gets the worst of both worlds: a PDF that is neither optimized for screen nor paper.
If you want your PDF to maintain the dark mode look and feel, use the Dark template. It is designed specifically for on-screen reading and digital sharing.
The Dark template uses a carefully chosen dark background with high-contrast light text, optimized for PDF rendering. Unlike a raw browser capture of a dark site, the template ensures consistent, readable output with proper line spacing and margins.
Dark PDFs are comfortable to read on monitors, tablets, and phones, especially in low-light environments. The Dark template preserves the reading experience that dark mode users prefer, without the visual inconsistencies of a browser print capture.
Developer documentation, code-heavy articles, and design portfolios often look best in dark mode. The Dark template maintains that aesthetic in PDF form, making it ideal for sharing technical content with colleagues or archiving reference material.
If you want a print-friendly PDF from a dark website, use the Clean or Minimal template. Pretty PDF's content extraction strips all original styling and produces a clean, light-mode document.
The content extraction pipeline removes all CSS from the original page, including dark backgrounds, custom colors, and theme-specific styling. The extracted article text is rendered fresh with the template's own clean stylesheet, giving you black text on white every time.
You do not need to toggle the site to light mode, use browser developer tools to change CSS, or rely on the browser's unpredictable print color inversion. The extraction handles it automatically regardless of the source site's theme.
A light-background PDF uses minimal ink, produces sharp text on paper, and is universally readable. The Clean and Minimal templates are designed for professional printed output, making them the ideal choice when a dark-mode page needs to end up on paper.
Both options produce excellent PDFs. The right choice depends on how you plan to use the document.
You are reading the PDF on screen. You are sharing the document digitally via email or messaging. You want to preserve the dark aesthetic for developer docs, portfolios, or dark-themed content. You are archiving content and want it to look like the original site.
You plan to print the PDF on paper. Accessibility is a priority, as light backgrounds with dark text meet more readability standards. You need a traditional, professional-looking document. You want to save ink or toner. The PDF will be read in bright environments.
Three steps to convert any dark mode website into a readable PDF. The entire process takes under a minute.
Open the dark-themed page you want to save. This can be any site using CSS dark mode, a browser-forced dark theme, a site that defaults to dark like many developer tools, GitHub in dark mode, or VS Code-style documentation pages. No special preparation is needed.
Click the Pretty PDF Printer icon in your Chrome toolbar. If you want to keep the dark aesthetic for screen reading, select the Dark template. If you want a light, print-friendly PDF, choose Clean or Minimal. The template controls the output styling, not the content extraction.
Click Generate. The extension captures the page content, the server extracts the article text and strips all original styling, applies your chosen template, and renders the final PDF. Your document downloads automatically with clean, readable formatting regardless of the source site's dark theme.
Pretty PDF handles every type of dark-mode website. The content extraction pipeline does not depend on the site's color scheme, so it works regardless of how the dark theme is implemented.
Sites that use prefers-color-scheme: dark media queries or CSS custom properties to implement dark mode. The extraction strips all CSS regardless of how the theme is applied.
Browser extensions or settings that force dark mode on websites that do not natively support it. These forced themes apply dark backgrounds via injected CSS, which the extraction pipeline removes entirely.
Websites and applications that ship with a dark theme as their default, with no light mode option. Terminal emulators, certain analytics dashboards, and many gaming or entertainment sites fall into this category.
Documentation sites, API references, and developer platforms that are commonly viewed in dark mode. These often have complex layouts with code blocks and syntax highlighting that Pretty PDF handles cleanly.
GitHub repositories, issues, pull requests, and discussions viewed with dark mode enabled. Pretty PDF's GitHub parser extracts the content structure regardless of the active color theme.
Technical documentation sites styled with dark, code-editor-inspired themes. These often feature monospace fonts, syntax-highlighted code blocks, and dark color palettes that the extraction pipeline handles without issues.
Keep the dark aesthetic or switch to light. Two great options for every dark-themed page you need to save.
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