How to Convert HTML and Web Content to PDF
HTML to PDF conversion lets you turn HTML files and web content into portable PDF documents. This is useful when you want to save a web page, archive online content, or share a webpage in a consistent format.
Two approaches: text extraction vs full rendering
Full HTML rendering (what headless Chrome does) preserves all CSS styling — colours, fonts, layout, images — exactly as the page would render in a browser. Text extraction pulls out the readable content and re-renders it cleanly without trying to preserve layout. PDFPuddle uses the second approach: simpler, faster, more reliable, but doesn't preserve CSS.
When PDFPuddle's approach is right
Saving the readable content of a long article. Converting an email's HTML body to a PDF for archiving. Producing a distraction-free print version of web content. For these cases, the lack of CSS is a feature — you get clean readable text without ad sidebars or layout cruft.
When you need full rendering
Marketing pages, design portfolios, and any HTML where the layout is the content need a full-rendering tool: Chrome's Print to PDF, Puppeteer (Node.js), or services like wkhtmltopdf. For those use cases, PDFPuddle isn't the right choice.
How to use PDFPuddle
Open HTML to PDF, paste HTML/text into the editor or upload an .html file, set font size, click Convert to PDF. The output is a paginated PDF with your text content in clean Helvetica.