Pretty PDF does the heavy lifting, but a few smart choices make the difference between a good PDF and a great one. These 10 tips will help you get the best results every time.
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Article mode is the default for a reason. It strips ads, navigation, and clutter, leaving just the content. When you convert a webpage with Article mode enabled, Pretty PDF's extraction engine identifies the main content area and discards everything else — sidebars, cookie banners, sticky headers, social sharing widgets, comment sections, and promotional blocks all disappear before the PDF is ever rendered.
The difference is dramatic. A typical news article or blog post surrounded by website chrome might produce a 9-page PDF through browser Ctrl+P. With Article mode, that same content becomes a focused 3-page document containing only the text and images you actually wanted to save.
Start with Article mode for everything and only switch to Full Page if you specifically need the complete page layout — for example, when saving a landing page design or a page where the surrounding context matters as much as the main content.
Match your template to your content. Pretty PDF includes five professionally designed templates, and each one is optimized for a different type of document. Choosing the right template is the fastest way to make your PDF look intentional rather than generic.
Clean is your best choice for articles, blog posts, and general web content. It uses balanced typography with comfortable spacing that makes long-form text easy to read. Corporate adds structured section dividers and a more formal appearance, ideal for business documents, reports, and meeting notes. Academic uses dense, serif-heavy typography suited to research papers, technical documentation, and reference material. Minimal strips away visual decoration for simple text-first documents where the content speaks for itself. Dark inverts the color scheme for screen reading, reducing eye strain when you plan to read the PDF on a device rather than print it.
The right template makes the content shine. A GitHub README in the Clean template looks like polished documentation. A research paper in the Academic template looks like it belongs in a journal. A Confluence page in the Corporate template looks like a proper business document.
You do not always need the full article. Sometimes you want a single quote, a specific table, a recipe without the 2,000-word backstory, or a code snippet from a longer tutorial. Selection mode lets you highlight exactly what you want on the page and generate a PDF of just that content.
This is especially useful for reference material. Highlight a function signature and its documentation from a reference page. Select a single answer from a Stack Overflow thread instead of the entire question with all its responses. Grab a specific chart or table from a data-heavy report. The resulting PDF contains only what you selected, formatted cleanly with your chosen template.
Selection mode also works well when Article mode captures too much — for instance, on pages with multiple distinct sections where you only care about one. Instead of getting the entire page and trimming mentally, select the section you need and generate a focused, single-purpose PDF.
Page size affects how content flows, where lines break, and how much fits on each page. The wrong page size can cause awkward text wrapping, cramped margins, or wasted whitespace. Getting this right takes two seconds and makes a visible difference.
A4 (210 x 297 mm) is the standard for international and European documents. If you are sharing with colleagues outside North America or working in an organization that uses ISO paper sizes, A4 is the correct choice. Letter (8.5 x 11 inches) is the North American standard. If you are printing on a US office printer or sharing with US-based recipients, Letter avoids scaling issues. Legal (8.5 x 14 inches) is taller than Letter and designed for legal documents, contracts, and forms that benefit from extra vertical space.
The default is usually fine for casual use, but when the PDF matters — for a presentation, a client deliverable, or printed reference material — matching the page size to the intended output prevents subtle formatting problems that make a document look slightly off.
Portrait orientation is the default because most web content — articles, blog posts, documentation — is taller than it is wide. But some content is inherently horizontal. Data tables with many columns, spreadsheet-style layouts, timelines, Gantt charts, wide diagrams, and panoramic images all fight against portrait orientation, resulting in truncated columns, tiny text, or awkward page breaks.
Switching to landscape gives you roughly 40% more horizontal space on the same paper size. A table that overflows in portrait might fit perfectly in landscape. A wide comparison chart becomes readable without squinting. A timeline that would require scrolling horizontally on screen lays out naturally across the wider page.
The rule of thumb: if the content is wider than it is tall, or if you find yourself wishing for more horizontal room, switch to landscape. You can change the orientation in the extension settings before generating the PDF. It takes one click and can transform a cramped, hard-to-read document into one that feels spacious and well-organized.
The instinct when generating a PDF is to download it immediately. It lands in your Downloads folder alongside hundreds of other files, and within a week you cannot find it. You remember saving it but cannot recall the filename, and searching your Downloads folder for "article" returns 47 results.
Saving to your Pretty PDF cloud library solves this problem. Every PDF you save is searchable by title, URL, date, and content. You can organize documents into collections, tag them for easy retrieval, and access them from any device. When you need that article you saved three months ago, you search for a keyword and find it in seconds instead of scrolling through a cluttered file system.
The cloud library also preserves the source URL, so you can always go back to the original webpage if you need to. Downloads get lost. Library documents stay organized and findable.
If you regularly save the same type of content, you are probably making the same configuration choices every time. Selecting the Corporate template for work documents. Choosing A4 for international reports. Picking Academic for research papers. Print profiles let you save these combinations so you can apply them with one click instead of configuring settings for every PDF.
Create a profile called "Work Reports" with the Corporate template, Letter size, and portrait orientation. Create another called "Research" with the Academic template, A4, and your preferred margins. A "Quick Read" profile with the Dark template for articles you plan to read on screen. Each profile remembers your template, page size, orientation, and other settings.
Profiles are especially valuable for teams. If everyone in your organization uses the same profile, every document that comes out of Pretty PDF has a consistent, professional appearance. No more variation in how different people configure their PDF settings.
Pro subscribers can add company logos, page numbers, dates, and custom text to headers and footers. This turns any web content into a document that looks like it came from your organization rather than from a random website. A Confluence page becomes a branded company document. A news article becomes a properly attributed research reference.
Custom headers and footers are particularly useful when sharing PDFs externally. A report sent to a client with your company logo in the header and a confidentiality notice in the footer looks intentional and professional. Without custom headers, the same content looks like something you printed from the internet — which, technically, it is, but it does not have to look that way.
You can configure header and footer content per print profile, so different types of documents can have different branding. Internal documents might show just a page number. Client-facing documents might include the logo, date, and document title. The flexibility lets you match the level of formality to the audience.
The Chrome extension is perfect for saving individual pages, but sometimes you need to convert more than a few. An entire documentation site. A collection of research articles. A weekly archive of industry news. Clicking the extension 50 times is tedious; scripting it through the API is effortless.
The Pretty PDF API accepts a URL or raw HTML and returns a generated PDF. You can script bulk conversions in any language — Python, JavaScript, bash, anything that can make HTTP requests. Feed it a list of URLs, choose your template and settings, and let it process them all. The API supports the same templates, page sizes, and extraction modes as the extension.
Common use cases include archiving an entire blog or documentation site, generating weekly PDF digests of bookmarked articles, creating automated reports from web dashboards, and building PDF generation into internal tools. If you find yourself using the extension more than a dozen times for similar content, the API is probably the better approach.
Preview your template choice before generating the final PDF. What looks great on a blog post might not work for a data table. The Clean template's generous spacing is perfect for long-form articles but can make a dense reference table feel disconnected. The Academic template's compact typography works well for research but can feel cramped on a short, image-heavy page.
The template preview shows you how your content will look with each template applied, letting you make an informed choice before the PDF is rendered. This is faster than generating a PDF, deciding you do not like the template, going back, switching templates, and generating again. A quick preview saves regeneration time and gets you to the right result on the first try.
This is especially useful when you are working with unfamiliar content types. If you usually save blog posts with the Clean template but today you are saving a GitHub issue thread or a Stack Overflow answer, preview first. The content structure is different, and a different template might serve it better than your default choice.
Article mode, professional templates, smart page settings. Ten tips, one extension, consistently great results.
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