Platform Guide

How to save a news article as a clean PDF

News websites are the worst offenders when it comes to clutter. Auto-playing videos, newsletter signups, interstitial ads, "recommended for you" widgets, cookie walls — printing a BBC or NYT article with Ctrl+P turns a 3-paragraph story into a 9-page mess. Pretty PDF's article extraction cuts through all of it, leaving you with just the journalism.

Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.

The problem

News sites are designed to keep you scrolling, not printing

Every element fighting for your attention on screen ends up in your PDF when you hit Ctrl+P.

Interstitial ads between paragraphs

Ad blocks injected every few paragraphs break up article text, adding 2-4 extra pages to your PDF with content you never wanted to print.

Auto-playing video players

Sticky video players that follow you down the page print as large black rectangles, wasting space and ink on an element that serves no purpose in a PDF.

Newsletter signup modals

Overlay modals and slide-in prompts asking for your email appear in print output as opaque boxes covering the article text beneath them.

"Recommended stories" widgets

Grids of clickbait thumbnails and "you might also like" sections add 3-5 pages of unrelated content to the end of every printed article.

Cookie consent banners

GDPR and cookie banners print as fixed-position bars across the top or bottom of every page, obscuring article content throughout the entire PDF.

Social sharing buttons on every paragraph

Floating share bars and inline social buttons clutter the margins and add visual noise that makes your printed article look unprofessional.

Article extraction

What Pretty PDF extracts from news articles

Our generic article extraction engine, powered by trafilatura, works across all news sites without needing site-specific parsers. It analyzes page structure to isolate the editorial content from everything else.

Headline and byline

The article headline, author name, and publication byline are extracted and placed prominently at the top of the PDF, giving your document a clear, professional header that identifies the source material at a glance.

Article body text

The full story text is captured without truncation. Every paragraph of the article is preserved in order, with proper formatting, paragraph breaks, and subheadings intact. No "read more" cutoffs, no missing content.

Article images with captions

Editorial photographs and infographics are preserved alongside their captions and credits. Ad images, tracking pixels, and decorative UI elements are identified and excluded automatically.

Publication date and source attribution

The publication date, source outlet, and article URL are captured and included in the PDF. This creates a proper citation record — essential for researchers, journalists, and anyone who needs to reference when and where something was published.

Clean typography with no ad insertions

The extracted article is rendered with professional typography using your chosen template. No ad blocks between paragraphs, no sponsored content injections, no "around the web" widgets breaking up the narrative flow.

Four steps

How it works on any news site

From any news article to a clean PDF in under ten seconds.

1

Open any news article

Navigate to an article on BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, or any news website. Pretty PDF works across all of them.

2

Click the Pretty PDF icon

Click the extension icon in your browser toolbar. Pretty PDF detects the page content and prepares to extract the article from the surrounding clutter.

3

Article mode auto-extracts the story

The extraction engine identifies the article body, headline, byline, and images. Ads, navigation, sidebars, comment sections, and promotional content are automatically stripped away.

4

Clean PDF downloads in seconds

Your article is formatted with professional typography and your chosen template, then delivered as a compact PDF. Just the journalism, nothing else.

Archiving the news: why PDFs matter

News articles change. Corrections are silently applied. Headlines get rewritten hours after publication. Updates are appended without clear notation. And sometimes, articles disappear entirely — pulled for legal reasons, removed during site redesigns, or lost behind paywall changes. What was published today may not be what the URL shows tomorrow.

A PDF is a permanent, timestamped snapshot of an article exactly as it appeared when you saved it. The text, images, byline, and publication date are frozen in a file that cannot be silently altered. This makes PDFs the most reliable format for preserving news content as a matter of record.

This matters across many professions. Journalists save source articles when researching stories — if an article they cited is later corrected or removed, the PDF proves what was originally published. Lawyers preserve news coverage as evidence in litigation, regulatory filings, and due diligence research where the original publication date and content are legally significant. Researchers and academics cite news articles in papers and need a stable reference that will not change or disappear behind a dead link. Media monitors and PR professionals archive coverage of their clients and need a permanent record of each mention. And anyone who reads the news may simply want a personal record of what was published — a story that moved them, an investigation they want to revisit, or a report they need to reference later.

Pretty PDF's cloud library, available on Pro+ plans, takes archiving further. Your saved articles are stored online with full-text search, so you can find any article in your archive by searching for a keyword, publication name, author, or topic. It turns a scattered collection of bookmarks and screenshots into a searchable personal news library.

Frequently asked questions

Pretty PDF captures the HTML that is already loaded in your browser. If you can see the full article on screen — because you have a subscription, you are within a free article limit, or the paywall has not activated — Pretty PDF can extract and convert it. It does not bypass paywalls or access content that is not rendered in your browser. If the article is truncated on screen, the PDF will contain only the visible portion.
Yes. Pretty PDF's article extraction engine identifies and removes interstitial ads, display ads, ad placeholders, sponsored content blocks, and tracking pixels. The extraction works by identifying the article body content and discarding everything else — ads, navigation, sidebars, and promotional elements are never included in the first place. The result is just the headline, byline, article text, and editorial images.
Video players are removed from the PDF since videos cannot be embedded in a PDF document. If the video has a poster image or thumbnail, that image may be preserved as a visual reference. The surrounding text and captions are kept intact. For video-heavy stories, the PDF will contain all the written content and still images, giving you a complete textual record of the article.
Pretty PDF works with virtually any news website. The article extraction engine uses content analysis algorithms rather than site-specific rules, so it automatically identifies the article body on any standard news page. This includes major outlets like BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Reuters, AP News, and thousands of regional and international publications. It also works with news aggregators, magazine sites, and blog platforms.
Absolutely. Once a news article is converted to PDF, it is a standalone file that requires no internet connection to read. You can save it to your device, transfer it to an e-reader, or store it in cloud storage for later. Pro+ subscribers also get access to the cloud library, which stores your PDFs online with full-text search — so you can find any article you have saved by searching for keywords, publication names, or topics.

Save your next news article as a clean PDF

Free tier, no credit card. 3 PDFs per month with all templates included.

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