Which app or website do you use to save clean webpages as PDF? Safari’s Reader view does not produce the best PDFs. Any other ideas?
I’ve used printfriendly which works as a bookmarklet. It allows you to pick and choose elements to remove
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Based on my experience, it’s a bit of a search for nirvana and perhaps “waiting for Godot”. Perhaps something will appear, though. I’m open to possibilities. Perhaps first try other browsers.
But, many commercial web sites do things to their web site’s technology to prevent saving to PDF, and sometimes saving to any format.
Good Luck.
If you print a webpage from reader mode it comes out clean.
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I am (way too) fussy about the end result, so I have put together a real Rube Goldberg process for turning web pages into PDFs:
- I save the page to GoodLinks.
- I use GoodLinks’ built-in copy to markdown command and paste the result into a new markdown note.
- I use Marked to export the result as a single-page PDF. (I like using Marked because I can select whichever css will give me the best result for what I’m saving.)
Most of what I save this way is either long with lots of sub-sections or image-heavy, so it’s worth the bother to me. (I do it often enough that it’s probably ripe for automation …)
Thank you for the link! I just gave Print Friendly a test drive and the results are really nice. I wish there were an option to save a continuous rather than paginated PDF, but it does a much better job than making a PDF from Safari’s Reader view.
like what others have mentioned, some web pages are more challenging thank others. NYT and Washington Posts to me are the toughest , their news stories tend to have a lot of animations (may be good experience for the readers). I like the emails from The Economist, I can click the "read in browser’’ link to open up relatively clean web pages.
As for pdf web clipper, I use the followings, not in any preference or order
- DEVONthink
- goodlinks
- anybox
On an iOS device, hit markup on a web page, it opens a pdf the way you see it created by the author. tap the down tick and save.
How do you do this? What does “hit markup” mean?
On a webpage, if you Select the SHARE icon and then scroll down
you can select MARKUP. You can then select “Done” and “Save File To”
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Thanks, that works! … (20 char)
I just use Safari’s Reader mode. I’m interested to know what you don’t like with that? The only downside for me is the stupid iOS issue of links not working when you print to PDF in iOS. Whether that’s an issue depends on the page though. When I know I need clickable links, I save the link until I’m on MacOS and then print to pdf (on a Mac the print to pdf option retains html links… don’t ask me why!).
The big plus for me is that Reader formats all pages the same way (font, font size, layout, etc.) so it’s nice and easy to read the PDFs.
I generally find that if Reader can’t parse a webpage, other apps can’t either. As others have mentioned, news sites in particular get ever craftier at preventing saving content to pdf 
Pocket (the read-it-later app) allows content to print to pdf and also has a nice layout, so I did use that sometimes before I stopped using it as my read-it-later app. It was especially handy if you’d already hit your free limit on paywalled websites for the month, as you didn’t need to load the original to print to pdf, you could just print the version of the article they had stored.
