Archive your favorite Substack publications permanently. Pretty PDF extracts newsletter content cleanly, removing all UI chrome and subscription prompts.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Newsletters are ephemeral by nature. The post you read this morning could disappear tomorrow. Authors delete posts, restructure their archives, move to different platforms, or shut down their publications entirely. A Substack newsletter that was free last month might move behind a paywall next month. The content you had access to yesterday is not guaranteed to be there tomorrow.
Substack's own export tools are designed for writers, not readers. As a publication owner, you can export your posts. As a subscriber, you cannot. You can bookmark posts within Substack, but those bookmarks are tied to the platform — if the author removes the post or leaves Substack, your bookmark points to nothing. Email copies sit in your inbox, but they lack the formatting and images of the web version, and searching through years of newsletter emails is impractical.
PDFs give you a permanent, portable copy of the newsletter content. A PDF does not depend on Substack's servers being online, the author keeping the post published, or your subscription remaining active. You can read it offline, print it, annotate it, share it, or archive it alongside PDFs from other sources. Building a personal archive of your subscriptions means the best writing you discover through newsletters stays accessible to you indefinitely.
A dedicated parser that detects Substack publications — including custom domains — and extracts clean newsletter content.
Pretty PDF detects Substack via the <meta name="generator"> tag that Substack injects into every page it serves. For custom domains, it also checks for substackcdn.com URLs in page assets. Whether the newsletter is on yourname.substack.com or a custom domain, it is detected and parsed correctly.
The parser strips Substack's entire UI shell — subscription prompts, share buttons, comment sections, recommendation cards, navigation, and footer — leaving only the newsletter title, author byline, publication date, and the full post body with all formatting intact.
Many popular Substack publications run on their own custom domains. Pretty PDF identifies these by detecting substackcdn.com URLs in the page's stylesheets, scripts, and images. No manual configuration is needed — if the publication is powered by Substack, the parser activates automatically.
Substack hosts images through its own CDN (substackcdn.com) with multiple resolution variants. Pretty PDF resolves these CDN URLs to their full-resolution versions and embeds them directly in the PDF. Newsletter images, charts, and illustrations are captured at the quality the author intended.
All five Pretty PDF templates — Clean, Minimal, Corporate, Academic, and Dark Mode — work with Substack's content structure. Each template applies professional typography with embedded fonts, proper heading hierarchy, and spacing tuned for long-form newsletter content.
From any Substack post to a clean PDF in under ten seconds.
Navigate to the newsletter post you want to save. This works on yourname.substack.com subdomains, custom domains that use Substack as their platform, and both free and paid posts you have access to.
Click the extension icon in your browser toolbar. Pretty PDF automatically detects that the page is a Substack newsletter — even on custom domains — and activates the dedicated Substack parser.
Pretty PDF extracts the newsletter content, strips all subscription prompts, share buttons, and comment sections, applies your chosen template, and returns a clean PDF ready to read, print, or archive.
Many of Substack's most popular publications use custom domains instead of the default yourname.substack.com address. A publication can use its own domain — like platformer.news, slowboring.com, or common-sense.news — while Substack handles all the hosting, content delivery, and subscriber management. The publication gets brand identity through its own URL; Substack provides the infrastructure.
This creates a challenge for tools that identify Substack content by checking the URL. If a tool only looks for "substack.com" in the domain name, it will miss every publication running on a custom domain. And many of Substack's highest-profile publications do exactly this — they use their own domains to establish independent brand identity while relying on Substack's platform underneath.
Pretty PDF uses two detection methods that work regardless of the domain name. First, it checks for the <meta name="generator"> tag that Substack injects into pages it serves, identifying the platform at the HTML level. Second, it looks for substackcdn.com URLs in the page's assets — images, stylesheets, and scripts that Substack serves from its CDN. If either signal is present, the Substack parser activates automatically.
No configuration is needed on your end. You do not need to tell Pretty PDF which domains are Substack publications. The detection is fully automatic: visit any page, click the extension, and if the page is powered by Substack, the Substack parser handles it. If it is not a Substack page, the generic extraction pipeline handles it instead.
Pretty PDF keeps the content you care about and removes everything else.
Full article text, embedded images with captions, blockquotes, code blocks, hyperlinks, ordered and unordered lists, headings, footnotes, horizontal rules, and bold/italic formatting.
Subscription CTAs, subscribe buttons, share buttons, comment sections, recommendation cards, navigation bar, footer, like buttons, and "this post is for paying subscribers" prompts.
Every PDF you create with Pretty PDF is automatically saved to your cloud library. Over time, this becomes a personal archive of the best newsletter writing you have discovered across all your Substack subscriptions — and from any other source you save with Pretty PDF.
Your cloud library lets you organize saved newsletters by publication, topic, or date. Tag PDFs with custom labels to group newsletters across publications by subject matter. A post about climate policy from one publication can sit alongside related posts from three other publications, all tagged and searchable in one place.
Full-text search works across all your saved newsletters. When you remember reading something months ago but cannot recall which publication it was in, search your library by keyword and find it instantly. Every word in every saved PDF is indexed and searchable, turning your collection of newsletters into a personal knowledge base that grows more valuable over time.
<meta name="generator"> tag that identifies Substack as the platform, and it looks for substackcdn.com URLs in the page's assets (images, stylesheets, scripts). If either signal is present, the Substack parser activates automatically. No configuration is needed on your end.Free tier, no credit card. 3 PDFs per month with all templates included.