Archive web sources before they change or disappear. Pretty PDF helps journalists preserve quotes, statements, articles, and evidence as permanent PDF records.
Free tier: 3 PDFs/month. No credit card required.
Web content is not permanent. Tweets get deleted. Articles get edited after publication. Statements get retracted or quietly reworded. Government pages get taken down after administration changes. News sites restructure their archives and break every old link. The webpage you are quoting today may not exist tomorrow.
For journalists and writers, this is not an inconvenience — it is a professional risk. If a source disappears after your story runs, you cannot prove what it said. If an article gets edited to remove the passage you quoted, your credibility is on the line. If a public figure deletes a social media post you referenced, the evidence vanishes.
Saving a bookmark does not solve this. Bookmarks point to live URLs that can change or break at any time. Screenshots capture the visual layout but are not searchable and are easy to dispute. You need a permanent, timestamped, full-text record of the source as it existed when you found it. That is what a PDF provides.
Every source you save becomes a permanent, searchable, timestamped PDF record.
Save the full text of source articles, reports, and investigations as permanent PDFs. If the original gets edited, paywalled, or taken down, your archived copy preserves the content exactly as it appeared when you found it.
Capture public statements, tweets, posts, and comments before they get deleted or modified. Social media content is especially volatile — a PDF snapshot with a timestamp is often the only reliable way to preserve what someone said publicly.
Before interviewing a source, save their public bio page, company about page, or LinkedIn profile as a PDF. This gives you a permanent record of how they presented themselves at the time of the interview, useful for fact-checking and follow-up stories.
Government websites, public filings, regulatory documents, and official statements change frequently without notice. Save these pages as PDFs to create a permanent record of official information as it was published at a specific point in time.
Track coverage from other outlets on the same story. Save competing articles to compare angles, identify gaps, and build a comprehensive picture of how a story is being reported. Useful for editors managing coverage strategy.
Collect background research, prior coverage, data sources, and reference materials into organized story folders. When you sit down to write, everything you need is in one searchable place instead of scattered across browser tabs and bookmark folders.
Journalism research accumulates fast. A single investigative piece can involve dozens of source articles, public records, social media posts, and background documents. Without a system, that research ends up scattered across browser tabs, bookmark folders, email threads, and local files — impossible to navigate when you are on deadline.
Pretty PDF's cloud library lets you create folders for each story or investigation. Every source you archive goes into the relevant story folder, tagged by source, topic, or date. When you need to find a specific quote or verify a fact, full-text search reaches across all your saved PDFs instantly.
This organizational structure persists across devices. Start researching on your desktop, continue on your laptop, and pull up a source on your phone during a meeting. Your entire archive is accessible from any device, organized the same way every time.
For long-running investigations, the library becomes an invaluable asset. Months of collected sources stay organized and searchable. When a new development breaks, you can quickly pull up all related sources you have already archived to check for connections or contradictions.
The average link half-life is about two years. That means roughly half of the URLs you reference today will be broken within 24 months. For journalists and writers whose work depends on verifiable sources, this is a serious problem. A citation that leads to a 404 page undermines your credibility and makes fact-checking impossible.
PDFs are permanent snapshots. They do not depend on the source staying online, the website maintaining its URL structure, or the publisher keeping the content accessible. Once you save a source as a PDF, that record exists independently of whatever happens to the original webpage.
This matters for fact-checking — both your own and by others. If an editor or reader questions a claim in your article, you can produce the PDF showing exactly what the source said and when you captured it. This is far more reliable than pointing to a URL that might have changed since you wrote the piece.
It also matters for legal protection. If your reporting is challenged, having timestamped PDF records of your sources provides stronger evidence than browser bookmarks or screenshots. The complete article text, captured at a specific date and time, is a more defensible record than a URL that may no longer resolve.
From live webpage to permanent PDF record in seconds.
Navigate to the article, post, public record, or any web page you want to archive. Make sure you can see the full content — if the page is behind a paywall, log in first so Pretty PDF can capture everything.
Click the Pretty PDF extension icon in your browser toolbar. The content is extracted, cleaned, and converted to a professionally formatted PDF with an embedded timestamp recording exactly when you captured it.
The PDF is saved to your cloud library. Organize it into your story or investigation folder, add tags for source type or topic, and it becomes part of your permanent, searchable research archive.
Sometimes you do not need the entire article. You need a specific quote, a particular data point, or a key passage that supports your story. Saving the full page works, but when you are building an evidence file for a specific claim, having dozens of full-page PDFs to sift through slows you down.
Pretty PDF's selection mode lets you highlight just the relevant portion of a page before generating the PDF. Select the quote, the paragraph, the table, or the section that matters, and capture only that content. The resulting PDF includes the selected content along with the source URL and timestamp, so you have full provenance without the surrounding clutter.
This is particularly useful for building evidence files around a specific claim or fact. Instead of saving 20 full articles and trying to remember which paragraph in each one was relevant, you save 20 focused excerpts — each one showing exactly the passage that matters, with its source and capture date clearly recorded.
Selection mode and full-page mode work together. Save the full article for your research archive, then save a selection of the key passage for your evidence file. Both PDFs link back to the same source URL, giving you both the broad context and the specific detail.
Free tier, no credit card. 3 PDFs per month with all templates included.
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