How to print a web page without ads

Press Ctrl+P on a news article or a recipe and the preview tells the story: the site header, a cookie notice, three ad slots, a sidebar of other stories, and the comments, spread over more pages than the article itself. The text you wanted is in there somewhere, squeezed into a column with the rest.

Web to File, a free Chrome extension, gives you a printer-friendly version of the page with only the part you came for. It works with any printer, and with Save as PDF.

Steps

1. Open the side panel by clicking the Web to File icon on the page you want to print.
2. Choose Article mode. The panel pulls out the title, text, and images, and leaves out the ads, menus, sidebars, and comments.
3. Check the preview. What you see in the panel is what goes on paper. If a newsletter box or a related-stories strip slipped through, remove it there.
4. Click the print button in the panel. The clean version opens in Chrome’s print dialog. Pick your printer, or choose Save as PDF.

You print fewer pages, and no ink goes on banners.

Print only part of a page

Sometimes the article is still more than you need: the ingredients and method of a recipe without the life story above them, two sections of a manual, one answer from a long thread.

Switch to Custom mode and click the parts you want. They line up in the panel, where you can reorder them and drop paragraphs you don’t need. The print button prints that selection and nothing else.

Print a ChatGPT conversation

Printing a ChatGPT chat from the browser usually gets you the sidebar and whatever part of the thread happens to be on screen. Long conversations come out cut short, and code runs off the edge of the page.

Open the panel on the conversation instead and print from there. You get the whole thread, every turn in order with who said it, and code blocks wrapped to fit the page. Shared conversation links work too.

Browser print or Web to File

Full Page mode is there too, for pages whose layout matters, such as an invoice or a dashboard. Its print button prints the page as it looks.

Would a file be better?

If you are printing to keep a copy rather than to read on paper, a file may serve you better. Web to File converts the same clean version to a PDF with selectable text, in the page size you choose, with an optional header and footer. The PDF guide covers that. For an e-reader, send it to your Kindle instead of printing it at all.

Frequently asked

Does it cost anything? No. Web to File is free, with no account and no watermark.

Will images print? Yes. Article mode keeps the article’s own pictures and leaves the ads out.

Can I change the paper size or margins? Paper size, margins, and scale are set in Chrome’s print dialog, the same as for any print.

Does it work on news sites and pages behind a login? Yes, including articles you can read because you’re signed in or subscribed. Web to File prints what your browser has already loaded. The only exceptions are Chrome’s own pages, such as chrome:// pages and the Chrome Web Store, where Chrome doesn’t let extensions run.