Turn Web Pages into Neatly Formatted PDF Documents with TidyRead

Productivity Sauce

Reading lengthy articles using a Web browser is rarely a pleasant experience. It's not only inconvenient but also rather distracting: most of the Web site is cluttered with all kinds of distractions like ads and widgets. To solve this problem, I use TidyRead. This handy extension for the Google Chrome browser (it works with Chromium, too) can extract the body of a Web page and present it in a reader-friendly form.

The extension does an exceptionally good job of extracting stuff that matters and discarding everything else. In addition to that, TidyRead offers a few options you can use to customize the default settings. For example, you can choose between different layout styles, select another font size, specify the column width, choose an alternative font, and change the alignment settings. Once TidyRead has massaged the Web page into a readable form, you can save the page as a neatly formatted PDF file by pressing Ctrl+P, choosing the Print to File option, and selecting PDF as the output format. Using this simple trick, you can archive interesting articles, read them offline, and even transfer them to your ebook reader (I use my Kindle 3 for that) and enjoy distraction-free reading.