How to Save a Webpage as PDF

Browser "Save as PDF" is a mess. Ads, navigation menus, cookie banners — everything gets dumped into your PDF. There's a better way.

The Problem

You want to save an article for offline reading or archival. You hit Cmd+P, choose "Save as PDF", and get... a cluttered document full of sidebar widgets and advertisements.

Some people use browser extensions. But they often break, require accounts, and add yet another tool to manage.

The Zo Solution

Zo reads the webpage, extracts the actual content (article text and images), and converts it to a clean PDF. One prompt, done.

Basic Usage

Just ask:

Save this article as a PDF: https://example.com/interesting-article

Zo will:

1. Fetch the page using a real browser (handles JavaScript, paywalls, etc.)

2. Extract the content — just the article, not the clutter

3. Embed images directly in the document

4. Convert to PDF using pandoc

5. Save to your workspace so you can download it anytime

Customization

Want different formatting? Just ask:

Save this as a PDF with larger text: https://example.com/article

Download this article as a two-column PDF: https://example.com/article

Batch Processing

Got multiple articles? Save them all at once:

Save these 3 articles as PDFs:
- https://example.com/article-1
- https://example.com/article-2
- https://example.com/article-3

How It Works Under the Hood

Zo has a save_webpage tool that:

• Visits the page with a real browser

• Uses readability algorithms to extract article content

• Downloads and embeds images

• Saves as clean Markdown to /home/workspace/Articles/

Since Zo is a full Linux environment, converting Markdown to PDF is trivial using pandoc. The AI chains these steps automatically.

Why Not Just Bookmark?

66% of links break within a decade. That article you want to reference later? It might be a 404 by next year.

Saving as PDF (or Markdown) means you own the content. It lives on your server, accessible anytime, regardless of whether the original site survives.

Related

For a deeper dive on web archiving, see How to save a webpage forever — which explains the Markdown-first approach for building a searchable, queryable archive.

PDFs are great for documents you want to read or share as-is. Markdown is better for content you want to search, transform, or build on.