Wikipedia is the world's knowledge base — but printing it is a mess. Pretty PDF extracts the article content cleanly, removing all the wiki chrome.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Wikipedia has its own "Download as PDF" feature through its Book Creator tool, but it is limited and often produces poorly formatted output. Tables break across pages in awkward places, infoboxes lose their structure, and complex articles with mathematical notation or nested lists can render incorrectly. The tool was designed years ago and has not kept pace with the increasingly rich formatting that Wikipedia editors use in modern articles.
Browser printing is even worse. When you press Ctrl+P on a Wikipedia article, the browser captures everything on the page — the left sidebar with navigation links, the language switcher listing dozens of translations, the table of contents panel, [edit] links next to every section heading, reference number brackets scattered throughout the text, the categories footer, and all the toolbox links. A ten-paragraph article about a historical event becomes a cluttered PDF where the actual content is buried under layers of Wikipedia's interface.
The [edit] links are a particularly persistent annoyance. Wikipedia places a small clickable "[edit]" next to every section heading so that contributors can quickly edit individual sections. These are essential for the collaborative editing workflow, but they are completely meaningless in a PDF document. Yet browser print includes them all, littering your headings with "[edit]" text that serves no purpose on paper.
Reference numbers present a similar problem. Wikipedia's inline citations appear as small superscript numbers like [1], [2], [47] throughout the text. In the browser, these are clickable links that jump to the references section at the bottom of the page. In a printed PDF, they are just visual noise — small numbers interrupting the flow of every paragraph, pointing to footnotes that may or may not be on the same page.
Intelligent content extraction that separates the article from the wiki.
Wikipedia's left sidebar — site logo, main page link, language switcher, tools menu, and the collapsible table of contents panel — is stripped entirely. Only the article body from the main content area is extracted, giving you a clean document without any site navigation.
Every [edit] link next to section headings is removed. Your PDF headings contain only the section title text, without any interactive artifacts from Wikipedia's editing interface. The heading hierarchy — from the article title through h2, h3, and h4 sections — is preserved cleanly.
The inline citation numbers — [1], [2], [47] — that interrupt text flow throughout Wikipedia articles are removed from the body text. The references section itself is preserved at the end of the article so you can still see the source list, but the distracting superscript numbers no longer clutter every paragraph.
Wikipedia articles are rich with visual content — photographs, diagrams, maps, flags, and infobox tables that summarize key facts. Pretty PDF preserves all of these elements. Images are embedded with their captions, and infobox tables retain their structured layout with all data intact.
Wikipedia editors use complex tables for data, comparisons, and timelines. Pretty PDF preserves table structure, column alignment, and header rows. The full heading hierarchy — from the article title down through nested subsections — is maintained, keeping the article's organizational structure clear in the PDF.
At the bottom of every Wikipedia article is a categories section listing all the classification tags editors have assigned. While useful for Wikipedia's internal organization, these category lists add unnecessary bulk to a PDF. Pretty PDF removes them, ending your document cleanly after the article content.
From any Wikipedia article to a clean, study-ready PDF in seconds.
Navigate to the Wikipedia article you want to save. This works on any language edition of Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org, ja.wikipedia.org, and all other subdomains.
Click the Pretty PDF icon in your browser toolbar. The extension captures the article content from the page and sends it to the Pretty PDF server for clean extraction and formatting.
Choose a template, click Generate, and download a clean PDF perfect for studying, sharing, or offline reference. All wiki chrome is gone — just the article content with professional formatting.
Wikipedia PDFs that are ready for academic and professional use.
Convert Wikipedia articles into clean study guides. The Academic template formats content with proper headings, readable body text, and structured tables — ideal for exam preparation and revision notes.
Build a library of reference PDFs from Wikipedia articles on your research topic. Each PDF is a self-contained document you can annotate, highlight, and organize alongside your primary sources.
Save Wikipedia articles for reading without an internet connection. Perfect for flights, commutes, or fieldwork locations where you need reference material but may not have reliable connectivity.
Use Wikipedia PDFs as background research when preparing presentations. The clean formatting makes it easy to extract key facts, dates, and data points for your slides.
Students can save Wikipedia articles as well-formatted PDFs to include as reference appendices in school projects. The professional formatting elevates the presentation compared to raw printouts.
Wikipedia articles change over time as editors update content. Save a PDF snapshot of the article as it appeared when you referenced it, preserving the exact content you cited for your records.
Pretty PDF keeps the content you need and strips everything you don't.
The full article content — every paragraph, list, and block quote — is extracted and formatted cleanly. The reading flow is maintained exactly as the original article presents it.
The complete heading hierarchy — h2, h3, h4 — is maintained with proper nesting. The article's organizational structure comes through clearly in the PDF, making long articles easy to navigate.
The summary infobox that appears on the right side of many Wikipedia articles — containing key facts, dates, statistics, and thumbnail images — is preserved with its tabular structure intact.
Photographs, diagrams, maps, charts, and other visual elements are embedded in the PDF along with their captions. The visual richness of the Wikipedia article is maintained.
Wikipedia's left sidebar — including the main page link, contents panel, community links, tools menu, language switcher, and all navigation elements — is completely removed from the PDF output.
The [edit] links that appear next to every section heading are stripped. Your PDF headings contain only the section title, without any Wikipedia editing interface artifacts.
The inline [1], [2], [47] citation numbers that clutter paragraph text are removed. The references section at the bottom of the article is preserved for source verification, but the distracting inline numbers are cleaned out.
The categories section at the bottom of Wikipedia articles — listing all classification tags assigned by editors — is removed. These internal organizational tags serve no purpose in a standalone PDF document.
Pretty PDF offers five professionally designed templates, each with embedded fonts and consistent typography. Three templates are particularly well-suited for Wikipedia content:
Academic — The ideal choice for study materials, research references, and any context where Wikipedia content will be used alongside academic work. The Academic template uses serif typography that echoes traditional textbook design, with generous margins for annotation and a clean heading hierarchy that maps well to Wikipedia's section structure. If you are saving Wikipedia articles for coursework, exam preparation, or research background, this is the template to use.
Clean — A versatile template that works well for general reading and sharing. Clean uses a balanced layout with readable body text and clear visual separation between sections. It is a good default choice when you want a polished PDF without any specific academic or corporate styling. Wikipedia articles about history, culture, geography, and science all read well in the Clean template.
Minimal — Best for note-taking reference and situations where you want the content to be as compact as possible. Minimal reduces visual ornamentation to the bare essentials, maximizing content density on each page. This template works well when you are saving Wikipedia articles as quick-reference documents that you will annotate heavily or use alongside other materials.
Free tier, no credit card. 3 PDFs per month with all templates included.