You found the perfect article — insightful analysis, useful reference material, something you will want to revisit. You hit Ctrl+P and get 11 pages of ads, navigation, comments, and newsletter signup forms surrounding 3 pages of actual content. Pretty PDF's Article mode fixes this. It extracts just the article and renders it as a professional document.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Article mode is how Pretty PDF turns a cluttered webpage into a focused, readable document. It is the default capture mode because most people saving a page want the content, not the chrome around it.
When you select "Article" as your capture mode (it is the default), Pretty PDF's server-side engine performs a series of extraction steps to isolate the content that matters. First, it identifies the main content area using content density analysis — an algorithm that scores DOM nodes based on the ratio of text to markup and structural signals like heading hierarchy, paragraph density, and semantic HTML tags.
Once the main content area is identified, the engine extracts the article title, byline, and publication date from structured metadata and visible page elements. It pulls in the full body text with all paragraphs preserved in their original order. Inline images and figures are included along with their captions. Code blocks, tables, blockquotes, and lists are preserved with their formatting intact.
Everything else is discarded. This includes all advertising and sponsored content, navigation menus and headers, cookie consent popups, newsletter signup forms and email capture modals, social share buttons and floating toolbars, sidebar widgets and related article links, comment sections, and footer boilerplate. The output is a focused, readable document that contains only what you came to the page to read.
The extracted content is then styled with your chosen template and rendered into a PDF using WeasyPrint, a professional-grade rendering engine. The result is a document that looks like it was intentionally designed rather than screen-captured from a browser window.
Here is exactly what changes when you save an article with Pretty PDF instead of your browser's built-in print function.
| Page element | Browser Ctrl+P | Pretty PDF Article Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Ads and sponsored content | Included in the PDF | Removed |
| Navigation and menus | Printed on every page | Gone |
| Cookie consent popups | Overlaid on content | Removed |
| Newsletter signup forms | Interrupting article | Removed |
| Social share buttons | On every paragraph | Gone |
| Sidebar and related articles | Taking half the width | Removed |
| Article text and images | Surrounded by clutter | Clean and focused |
| Page count | 11 pages | 3 pages |
The difference comes down to approach. Your browser prints everything on the page because it cannot distinguish content from clutter. Pretty PDF's extraction engine analyzes the HTML structure, identifies which elements are the article and which are the surrounding interface, and discards everything that is not part of the content you want to keep.
The entire process takes less than 30 seconds. Article mode is the default, so there is almost nothing to configure.
Navigate to the web article you want to save. This can be a news story on BBC or CNN, a blog post on WordPress, a newsletter on Substack, a deep dive on The Atlantic, or any other long-form content. Make sure the full article is loaded and visible in your browser.
Click the Pretty PDF icon in your Chrome toolbar to open the extension popup. It will display the article title and give you access to all conversion settings. If the icon is not visible, click the puzzle piece icon in Chrome's toolbar and pin Pretty PDF for quick access.
You do not need to change anything. Article mode is the default capture setting, which means the extraction engine will automatically identify the main content area of the page. It will pull out the article text, images, code blocks, and tables while discarding ads, navigation, sidebars, and comments.
Select one of the five professional templates. Clean is ideal for most articles — it provides generous margins, clear heading hierarchy, and comfortable reading typography. Use Academic for research content, Corporate for business reports, or Minimal for a distraction-free reading experience.
Click Generate PDF. Your browser sends the page content to the Pretty PDF server, where the article is extracted, styled with your chosen template, and rendered into a PDF. The finished file downloads automatically in a few seconds with a readable filename based on the article title. No ads, no clutter, no 11-page mess.
Article mode is not limited to a handful of supported websites. It works on any page with a recognizable main content area, which covers the vast majority of the web.
Pretty PDF's generic extraction engine handles articles from every category of website you read. News sites like BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Reuters all work reliably. Blog platforms including WordPress, Ghost, and custom-built blogs are fully supported. Magazine and long-form publications — Wired, The Atlantic, The Verge, Ars Technica, and similar outlets — produce clean, well-structured PDFs. Newsletter archives from Substack and Mailchimp render beautifully. Tech publications like TechCrunch and HackerNews discussions are handled cleanly.
For eight platforms, Pretty PDF goes further with dedicated parsers that understand the specific HTML structure of each site:
These dedicated parsers provide even better results than the generic engine. The Medium parser handles custom domains and paywalled-but-visible content. The Substack parser detects newsletters served from custom domains and extracts them with proper heading structure. The GitHub parser handles README files, issues, pull requests, discussions, wiki pages, and code files with syntax-appropriate formatting.
For everything else — and that includes millions of websites — the generic extraction engine handles it. It uses the same content density analysis algorithms behind browser reader modes, tuned specifically for PDF output, to find and extract the main content from any webpage.
Pretty PDF generates a readable filename so your downloads folder stays organized without any extra effort.
When you save an article with your browser's built-in PDF function, the filename is often unhelpful — "Untitled.pdf", "about:blank.pdf", or a garbled string of URL parameters. You end up manually renaming every file or searching through a folder of identically named PDFs to find the one you need.
Pretty PDF automatically generates a readable filename from the article title and source URL. An article titled "The Future of Web Standards" from example.com becomes something like The-Future-of-Web-Standards-example-com.pdf. The filename includes enough context to identify the content at a glance, making your downloads organized from the start without any manual renaming.
No more ads, no more clutter, no more 11-page printouts of 3 pages of content. Just the article, professionally styled.
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