Webpage Print Pretty

Read the article, not the webpage around it

Most articles on the web arrive wrapped in menus, cookie banners, share buttons, related-story carousels, ads and comment widgets. Printing such a page wastes paper on all of it, and reading it on a small screen is a chore. Webpage Print Pretty asks for one thing, the address of an article, and returns just the article: its title, author, site name, a short excerpt and the body text with its images, laid out on a calm, book-like page. From there you can download a PDF of the cleaned article to keep, print or send.

What happens when you press Extract

The work is done on the site's server, not in your browser. When you submit a URL:

1. The server downloads the page's HTML from the address you entered.
2. The HTML is analysed with the fivefilters Readability library, a PHP port of the readability approach used by browser reader modes. It scores the blocks of the page and keeps the one that looks like the main article, discarding navigation, sidebars, footers and other clutter. Relative links and image paths are rewritten as full addresses so they still work outside the original site.
3. The extracted article is cleaned further. Scripts, style blocks and inline event handlers are removed, and only a reading-friendly set of elements is kept: paragraphs, headings, links, images, lists, blockquotes, bold and italic text, code, figures with captions, line breaks and rules. Lazy-loaded images that keep their real address in a data-src or data-original attribute are switched to that real address so they display.
4. The server builds a styled reading page around the result and sends it back, together with the article's title, author, site name, excerpt and source URL.

Extraction results are cached on the server for one hour per URL. If you extract the same address again within that hour, you get the same version even if the original page has changed in the meantime.

The workspace

Extract Article

The left-hand card holds the form. Article URL is required and must be a full web address such as https://example.com/article. PDF Filename is optional and accepts up to 180 characters. Below them sit the Extract button and the Download PDF button, which stays disabled until an extraction succeeds. A status line reports progress, success or the reason for a failure.

Article Info

After a successful extraction this card shows the article title, badges for the author and site when the page provides them, the excerpt, and a link back to the source URL. It is a quick way to confirm the tool found the article you meant and not, say, a cookie notice.

Pretty Preview

The large panel on the right renders the cleaned page: a warm paper-coloured sheet, a serif typeface at a comfortable reading size, the title as a large heading, a meta line with author and site, the source link, the excerpt set off in italics with a rule beside it, and then the article body with images scaled to fit.

How to use it

1. Copy the address of the article from your browser's address bar.
2. Paste it into Article URL.
3. Optionally type a name in PDF Filename, for example climate-report-summary.
4. Press Extract and wait for the status line to say the readable article was extracted.
5. Check Article Info and scroll through the Pretty Preview to confirm the whole article is there.
6. Press Download PDF. A new tab opens and the browser downloads the PDF.

About the PDF

The PDF is generated on the server when you press Download PDF. The server runs the same extraction again (served from the one-hour cache when available), sanitises the HTML with HTML Purifier, downloads and embeds the article's remote images, and renders the result with the tc-lib-pdf library onto A4 portrait pages with 32-point margins. The file is sent straight to your browser as a download rather than kept on the server. The PDF's document properties carry the article title and, when known, the author.

The PDF is a plainer document than the preview. Sanitising for PDF removes the preview's stylesheet, so the warm background, serif font and decorative excerpt rule do not appear in the PDF. You get the same title, meta line, source link, excerpt and article content in a clean default layout.

How the file is named

• If you filled in PDF Filename, that name is used. Any character other than letters, digits, hyphens and underscores is replaced with a hyphen, and .pdf is added.
• If you left it empty, the name is made from the article title, converted to a lowercase, hyphenated slug.
• If neither gives a usable name, the file is called readable-article.pdf.

Who finds it useful

• Readers who print long-form articles and want only the text on paper.
• Students and researchers saving sources as PDFs with the title and source URL printed at the top.
• Teachers preparing distraction-free handouts from online articles.
• Anyone archiving a recipe, tutorial or guide before the page changes or disappears.
• E-reader users who want a clean PDF to sideload.

Tips

• Use the article's own address, not a homepage, category page or search result. Readability looks for one main block of text; listing pages rarely have one.
• Check the end of the preview. On some layouts the extractor stops early or includes a related-articles block. If the result is wrong, try the page's print or AMP version if the site offers one.
• Give the PDF a meaningful name when titles are long or contain symbols.
• Allow pop-ups for the site if Download PDF seems to do nothing; the download starts in a new tab.

What not to expect

• Paywalled or login-only content. The server fetches the page as an anonymous visitor, so it only sees what a logged-out visitor sees.
• Pages built entirely with JavaScript. If the article text is loaded by scripts after the page opens, the downloaded HTML may contain nothing to extract.
• Tables, videos, embeds and forms. These elements are not on the kept list. Table text may survive as loose text, but the grid is lost, and embedded videos and widgets are removed.
• Private or local addresses. The page must be reachable from the public internet by the site's server.
• Comment threads. Readability usually treats them as clutter and leaves them out, so do not rely on the tool to save a discussion.

Common messages

Privacy

You only send an address, never the page content. The site's server visits that address on your behalf, so the target website sees a request from the server rather than from you. The extracted article is cached on the server for one hour to speed up repeat requests and the PDF download. The PDF itself is generated on request and streamed to you.

Frequently Asked Questions