Medium Article to PDF: Save Stories Without Paywalls (2026)
Medium's reading experience is designed for the web — it doesn't ship a "Save as PDF" button, and the built-in browser print produces a mess of cropped images, floating "highlight" buttons, and the Medium banner pasted on every page. This guide shows the cleanest way to save an article you have legitimate access to, without an upload-based "Medium downloader" service.
A note up front: this guide is about saving articles you can already read — your own drafts, free posts, friend-link views, and Member-tier content while you're signed in. It's the digital equivalent of printing a page you're already reading. Don't use it to circumvent Medium's paywall.
Why save Medium articles as PDF?
- Offline reading. Long-form tech posts are easier to digest on a tablet without a network.
- Citations for research. Linked references decay; the PDF freezes the version you cited.
- Personal archive of your own writing. Article tombstones (deleted posts) are unrecoverable from Medium itself.
- Annotation and markup. Highlighting in a PDF is faster than Medium's web annotations.
Method 1: Save as MHTML, then convert (highest fidelity)
MHTML captures the rendered page exactly as your browser saw it — fonts, images, code blocks, callouts, the lot — in a single file. It's the right tool for article archiving.
- Open the article and let images lazy-load (scroll to the bottom once).
- In Chrome/Edge/Brave:
Ctrl/Cmd+S→ choose Webpage, Single File. You'll get a.mhtmlfile. - Open to-pdf.com/mhtml-to-pdf and drop the file in.
- The tool removes the Medium chrome and renders the article body cleanly.
- Click Download PDF. Everything happens in your browser.
See Save Webpage as PDF: Why MHTML Beats Print for the rationale on why this beats Chrome's print dialog.
Method 2: Reader mode → copy → Markdown (cleanest text)
If you want a typographically clean, no-images version (great for offline reading on e-readers), strip the article to text:
- Open the article and enable your browser's Reader mode (Safari, Firefox), or use a Reader extension in Chrome.
- Select all → copy.
- Paste into to-pdf.com/markdown-to-pdf.
- Add a header line with the title, author, and URL so the PDF has provenance.
- Click Download PDF.
Method 3: For your own published Medium articles
Medium lets authors export their entire account history as a zip from Settings → Account → Download your information. That zip contains HTML files for every post. Convert any of them with to-pdf.com/html-to-pdf for a perfectly-fidelity archive of your own writing.
Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Images missing in the PDF
Medium lazy-loads images as you scroll. Before saving the MHTML, scroll all the way to the bottom (or use End) so every image fires its loader. Then scroll back up and save.
Code blocks losing syntax highlighting
MHTML preserves the CSS, so highlighted code keeps its colors. Markdown paste loses them — but the editor in our Markdown tool re-highlights based on the language tag if you wrap the block:
```python
def hello():
print("kept")
```Pull quotes rendering as plain text
Medium uses <blockquote> for pull quotes. MHTML preserves the
bigger styling; copy-paste falls back to plain blockquote. If aesthetics matter,
use Method 1.
Embedded tweets / gists not rendering
Embeds are iframes pointing to external services. MHTML may capture the iframe URL but not its content. The PDF will show a placeholder. Screenshot the embed separately and append with the workflow in combine files to PDF.
Privacy: no Medium URL ever leaves your browser
Both MHTML-to-PDF and Markdown-to-PDF process files locally. You don't paste a URL into a third-party server; you save the page yourself and convert it on your machine. That matters if the article is unpublished, a friend-link draft, or member-only.