Printing a webpage with Ctrl+P wastes ink on ads, navigation, sidebars, and footers. Pretty PDF strips the clutter first — so you print only what matters, using fewer pages and less ink.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Hit Ctrl+P on a typical news article and you get: the article itself (2 pages), plus a navigation bar, a sidebar packed with ads, a comments section, related articles, and a footer stuffed with links — totaling 6-8 printed pages. That is 4-6 wasted pages of ink and paper for content nobody reads on paper.
Multiply that by every article you print and it adds up fast. If you print just a few articles a week, those extra pages mean dozens of wasted sheets per month. Every unnecessary element on the page — banner ads, social sharing buttons, cookie consent dialogs, promotional sidebars — translates directly to ink sprayed on paper and sheets pulled from the tray. The browser does not distinguish between content you want and content you do not. It prints everything.
Article extraction removes everything that is not the main content. What remains is exactly what you wanted to print in the first place.
Gone. Banner ads, sidebar ads, interstitial ads, and sponsored content blocks are all stripped during content extraction. No more wasting ink on advertisements you never wanted on paper.
Gone. Header menus, breadcrumbs, hamburger menus, and site-wide navigation links are removed. These elements serve no purpose on a printed page.
Gone. Trending articles, tag clouds, newsletter signup forms, and social media widgets are all removed. The sidebar typically adds 1-2 extra printed pages on its own.
Gone. User comments can add multiple pages to a printout, especially on popular articles. Pretty PDF extracts only the author's content.
Gone. GDPR consent dialogs, cookie notices, and privacy popups are stripped out. These overlays often print as large blocks of text covering the actual content.
Gone. "You might also like" sections, recommended reading lists, and content carousels are removed. What is left: the title, article text, and relevant images.
The result: page count drops by 50-80% depending on the site. A news article that printed as 8 pages becomes 2. A recipe that printed as 6 pages becomes 1. You get exactly the content you wanted, formatted cleanly on the fewest pages possible.
Five steps to a clean, ink-efficient printout. The process takes about 30 seconds.
Open the webpage in Chrome as you normally would. It can be a news article, blog post, recipe, documentation page, or any other content you want to print without the surrounding clutter.
Click the Pretty PDF Printer icon in your Chrome toolbar. The extension will detect the page and display your conversion options. If the icon is hidden, click the puzzle piece in Chrome's toolbar and pin Pretty PDF for quick access.
Article mode automatically identifies the main content and strips away ads, navigation, sidebars, comments, cookie banners, and related article sections. Only the title, article text, and relevant images remain.
Select an ink-efficient template. Minimal uses no background colors and no decorative elements — the least ink of any template. Clean adds slight color accents but remains very print-friendly. Both are designed to minimize ink consumption.
Click Generate to create your clean PDF. Once downloaded, open it and print. You will immediately see the difference — fewer pages, no clutter, and dramatically less ink usage compared to printing the original webpage with Ctrl+P.
Each Pretty PDF template has different ink characteristics when printed. Choose the right one for your printing needs.
No background colors, no decorative elements, minimal ink usage. Pure text on white paper. This template uses the absolute least amount of ink and is the best choice when printing is your primary goal.
Slight color accents but still very print-friendly. A small amount of color adds visual hierarchy without significantly increasing ink usage. A close second to Minimal for ink efficiency.
Header bars use some ink but not excessive. Good for professional documents where a polished look matters. The color usage is contained to headers and accents, keeping overall ink consumption moderate.
Efficient for text-heavy content. Designed with generous margins and clean typography that works well for printed reference material. Ink usage is low, comparable to Clean.
NOT recommended for printing. The Dark template uses a dark background that would consume enormous amounts of ink on every page. It is designed for screen reading only. If you plan to print, use Minimal or Clean instead.
Typical page reductions when using Pretty PDF instead of Ctrl+P. The more cluttered the original site, the bigger the savings.
8 pages with Ctrl+P becomes 2 pages with Pretty PDF. That is a 75% reduction. News sites are among the most cluttered, with ads, related stories, and comments adding significant page count.
5 pages becomes 1-2 pages, a 60-80% reduction. Blog sidebars, author bios, comment sections, and newsletter popups are all removed, leaving just the post content.
6 pages becomes 1 page, an 83% reduction. Recipe sites are notorious for burying the actual recipe under paragraphs of backstory, ads, and pop-ups. Pretty PDF extracts the recipe itself.
4 pages becomes 2-3 pages, a 25-50% reduction. Documentation sites tend to be cleaner, so the savings are smaller but still meaningful — navigation panels and footer links are removed.
If you print 10 articles per week and save an average of 4 pages each, that is 40 fewer pages per week. Over a year, that adds up to over 2,000 pages you did not print. For an office or team that prints regularly, the numbers multiply quickly.
Less paper means fewer trees harvested for pulp. Less ink means less chemical waste from cartridge production and disposal. Fewer printed pages also mean less energy consumed by the printer itself. These are small changes at the individual level, but they compound across thousands of users making the same daily printing decisions.
Small changes in printing habits add up to meaningful environmental impact. Printing only what you need is one of the simplest ways to reduce your office's environmental footprint, and it starts with not printing the parts of a webpage that have no value on paper.
Stop wasting pages on ads, navigation, and sidebars. Pretty PDF extracts the content and formats it for efficient printing.