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How to Choose the Right PDF Template for Your Content

Five templates, each designed for a different purpose. This guide helps you match your content to the template that makes it look its best — whether you are saving an article, a business report, or developer documentation.

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The quick decision tree

You do not need to read this entire guide to pick the right template. Answer one question about your content, and you have your answer.

Saving an article, blog post, or newsletter? Use Clean. Its editorial typography and warm accents make any written content look polished and intentional.

Need the simplest possible output? Use Minimal. No decoration, no color, no custom fonts. Just your content with the smallest visual footprint.

Creating a document for work or clients? Use Corporate. Professional blue palette, structured borders, and formal typography signal that this is a business document.

Working with research or academic content? Use Academic. Serif typography, structured headings, and generous margins create a scholarly feel that matches the content.

Saving developer docs or dark-themed content? Use Dark. Dark background with light text reduces eye strain, and code blocks stand out naturally.

Not sure? Start with Clean. It is the default template for a reason — it works well for virtually every type of content. You can always regenerate with a different template if you want a different look.

Template 1

Clean Template

Best for articles, blog posts, newsletters, recipes, and general content.

Clean is the most versatile template and the default choice for a reason. It pairs Fraunces for headings with Instrument Sans for body text, creating a modern editorial feel that works across virtually any type of written content. The typography alone sets it apart from anything a browser can produce — these are fonts chosen specifically for readability on paper and screen, embedded directly into the PDF so they render consistently on every device.

The design uses generous whitespace between sections, warm color accents on headings and links, and carefully tuned line height and paragraph spacing for comfortable reading. Images are displayed at full column width with subtle rounding. Code blocks get a light background with clear borders. Tables are clean and well-spaced.

If you save articles from Medium, Substack, news sites, personal blogs, or any content-driven website, Clean will produce a PDF that looks like it was professionally typeset. It transforms a web page into a document that feels intentional — something you would be comfortable sharing, printing, or archiving. When in doubt, use Clean. It handles edge cases gracefully and makes everything look better than it did on the original website.

Template 2

Minimal Template

Best for documentation, notes, drafts, and print-first content.

Minimal strips away every visual element that is not strictly necessary. No custom fonts — it uses the system font stack, so the PDF renders with whatever default sans-serif is available on the reader's device. No color accents on headings or links. No decorative borders or section dividers. No background fills on code blocks beyond the bare minimum needed to distinguish them from body text.

This is not a limitation; it is the point. Minimal is designed for situations where visual styling would be a distraction. If you are saving documentation for personal reference, drafting notes from a webpage, printing content where ink usage matters, or creating a PDF that needs to look neutral and unbranded, Minimal is the right choice. It puts maximum content into minimum visual overhead.

Minimal also produces the smallest file sizes of any template because it does not embed custom fonts. For archival use cases where you are saving hundreds of pages of reference material, this adds up. And because it uses no color accents and no background fills, it is the most print-friendly option — your printer uses only black ink on white paper, exactly as you would expect from a straightforward text document.

Template 3

Corporate Template

Best for business reports, proposals, compliance docs, and client deliverables.

Corporate uses Arial and Helvetica typography — the universal language of business documents. These are fonts that every stakeholder, client, and executive recognizes as professional. The template adds structured section borders, a restrained blue color palette for headings and accents, and clear visual hierarchy that makes long documents scannable.

The design signals formality without being stuffy. Section dividers separate content blocks with thin horizontal rules. Heading sizes follow a strict typographic scale that distinguishes H2s from H3s from H4s at a glance. Tables get alternating row backgrounds for readability. Blockquotes are offset with a left border in the blue accent color. The overall impression is of a document that came from a professional tool, not from someone who printed a web page.

Corporate is the right choice when the PDF will be shared externally — sent to a client, attached to a proposal, included in a compliance package, or distributed in a meeting. Pro users can pair it with custom headers and footers to add company logos, document numbers, and confidentiality notices, turning a web page into something that looks like it was produced by your organization's document management system.

Template 4

Academic Template

Best for research papers, lecture notes, journal articles, and study materials.

Academic uses serif typography to create a scholarly tone that matches research and educational content. The font choice is deliberate — serif faces have been the standard in academic publishing for centuries because they aid readability in long-form text and signal intellectual rigor. When you save a research paper, journal article, or lecture notes with the Academic template, the output feels like it belongs in a university library, not on a website.

The template features a structured heading hierarchy designed for complex, multi-level documents. H2 headings mark major sections with clear visual weight. H3 and H4 headings provide granular structure without overwhelming the page. Wider margins leave room for handwritten annotations if you print the document — a deliberate design choice for students and researchers who mark up their reading material.

Footnotes, citations, and reference lists are handled with appropriate formatting. Tables are rendered with academic styling — clean gridlines, centered headers, and proper alignment. Code blocks maintain their monospace formatting but use the template's serif-adjacent styling for surrounding text. If the content you are saving has any scholarly character — Wikipedia articles, arXiv papers, university course pages, research blog posts — Academic will make it feel authoritative and well-structured.

Template 5

Dark Mode Template

Best for developer documentation, API docs, code-heavy content, and screen reading.

Dark inverts the traditional color scheme — light text on a dark background. This is not just an aesthetic preference. For developer documentation, API references, and code-heavy content, a dark background reduces eye strain during extended reading sessions and makes code blocks feel native rather than bolted on. Syntax-highlighted code that lives on a dark background looks the way developers expect it to look, because that is how most code editors and terminals present it.

The template uses carefully chosen text colors that maintain sufficient contrast ratios for accessibility while avoiding the harshness of pure white on pure black. Headings use a slightly brighter weight. Links are tinted to remain visible without clashing with the dark palette. Tables and blockquotes use subtle background variations to create visual separation without introducing jarring brightness.

One important caveat: Dark is not recommended for printing. A dark background on paper means your printer lays down ink or toner across the entire page surface, consuming enormous amounts of consumables and producing a result that does not look as good on paper as it does on screen. If you plan to print, choose Clean or Minimal instead. Dark is optimized for on-screen reading — viewing the PDF on a tablet, laptop, or monitor where the dark background genuinely reduces eye fatigue.

Comparison

Template comparison table

All five templates side by side so you can compare at a glance.

Template Typography Color Best For Print-Friendly
Clean Fraunces + Instrument Sans Warm accents Articles, blogs, newsletters Yes
Minimal System fonts None Docs, notes, drafts Best (least ink)
Corporate Arial / Helvetica Professional blue Reports, proposals, deliverables Yes
Academic Serif Neutral Research, lectures, journals Yes
Dark Sans-serif, light text Dark background Dev docs, API refs, code No (high ink usage)

Frequently asked questions

You would need to regenerate the PDF with a different template selected. The template is applied during generation, not after — Pretty PDF Printer renders the PDF server-side using the chosen template's CSS, so changing the template means creating a new PDF. The process takes just a few seconds: select a different template in the extension popup and click generate again.
Minimal uses the least ink because it has no color accents, no background fills, and relies on system fonts. Clean is a close second with only subtle warm color accents on headings. Corporate and Academic are both print-friendly with restrained color use. Avoid Dark for printing — the dark background consumes enormous amounts of ink and toner, and the result does not look as good on paper as it does on screen.
Enterprise subscribers can request custom CSS templates matching their brand guidelines, including custom fonts, colors, logos, and layout rules. All users on Pro plans can customize headers and footers to add their own branding to any of the five built-in templates. For most users, the five included templates cover the full range of common document types and use cases.
No. Content extraction and template selection are completely independent processes. The extraction engine decides what content to include by stripping ads, navigation, and clutter from the source page. The template decides how that extracted content looks by applying typography, colors, and layout rules. You get exactly the same content regardless of which template you choose — only the visual presentation changes.

Find your perfect template

Five professional templates, each designed for a different purpose. Try them all free — 3 PDFs per month, no credit card required.

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