It's often desirable to print articles or blog posts to PDF for easier reading. In fact you're almost always better off reading a cleaned-up printout than a noisy HTML page on a backlit screen.
Offline reading has fewer distractions; you can mark up the article with your own notes; and it's easier on the eyes. Active reading, underlinding and annotating improves comprehension and retention. If you read on the reMarkable tablet, as I do, then you don't to print to actual paper and save trees.
If an article is worth reading, it's worth printing and reading with a pen in your hand.
Chrome's Print-to-PDF function works well. But many websites don't offer good print CSS styles. Often, the text is obscured by popups.
Firefox comes with a little-known feature called Reader View.
When it works it does the job well. Unfortunately, the toolbar icon doesn't appear for all pages. For example, Substack newsletters don't seem to be supported.
Plus I don't use Firefox normally.
Printfriendly is a server-side service that takes any web page and extracts only the human-readable elements from it.
This does a good job most of the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for servies behind a paywal.
Simple Print lays out blog posts and articles in a two-column layout, similar to a journal article. This makes the resulting PDF easy to read.
It doesn't support paywalled content.
Reader Mode is a Chrome extension that offers the required functionality to remove clutter and obstructing overlays from web sites.
Note that you need to use the little printer icon in Reader-Mode-specific UI, rather than Chrome's built-in Cmd-P command - otherwise the print preview may spin indefinitely or show up empty.
The company behind readermode.io also offers a Premium version, which allows you store articles in cloud and find text via full-text search. Because it's a browser extension, Reader Mode works for paywalled web pages like Substack.
Currently Reader Mode (readermode.io) is the best option.
Below are recommendations for printing specific sites with interesting content
Github READMEs and other markdown-generated documents are already nicely formatted. All you need to do is to remove the surrounding UI. This bookmarklet does the job:
javascript:void function(){b=document.body,c=document.querySelector("article"),b.innerHTML="",b.appendChild(c)}();
It even works for this gist!
Twitter threads are notoriously hard to read. To make them printable, go to Thread Reader and paste in the Twitter URL. (Don't do "@threadreaderapp unroll", that adds more noise for others.)
The resulting page can be printed (here's an example). It's better to run the page through Reader Mode to remove irrelevant noise.
Thread Reader also offers a premium plan that generates PDFs for you.
As of August 2022, Substack can only printed readably with Reader Mode.
Reader Mode does a good job of making Medium posts more readable.