How to print a Substack post

A good essay is easier to read on paper. You can mark it up, set it down, and come back to it without a screen asking for your attention. Printing one from a newsletter takes a little care, though. A post's web page carries more than the essay: subscribe buttons, share bars, comment threads, and images that can fill a page on their own.

This guide covers the free way to print a Substack post from your browser, what each setting does, and where the method runs out.

Before you start

Print only what you can read. A free post is public. A paid post is for the subscriber who paid for it, so keep any copy for yourself. Either way, keep the writer's name and the post's title on the page when you trim it.

Step 1: Open the post on its own page

Use a web browser on a computer, not an app. Every Substack post has its own address, which usually ends in /p/ and the post's title. If you start from the email, click the post's title to open it on the web. The web page prints far better than most email layouts, which are built for a narrow phone screen.

Step 2: Switch to reader mode

Reader mode strips a page down to its title, byline, text and main images. It is the quickest way to lose the buttons.

• Safari: choose View, then Show Reader, or press Command, Shift and R. Printing from Reader prints the clean version.
• Firefox: click the reader icon in the address bar, or press Ctrl, Alt and R (Command, Option and R on a Mac). Its print preview also offers a Simplify page option on many posts.
• Edge: open Immersive Reader from the address bar, or press F9, then print from there.
• Chrome: its Reading mode opens in a side panel and does not print. Clean the page by hand in Step 4 instead, or use another browser for this one post.

Reader mode is not perfect. It sometimes drops footnotes, captions or a pull quote. Check the end of the post against the original before you print.

Step 3: Set up the print dialog

Open the print dialog with Ctrl and P, or Command and P on a Mac. The names below are Chrome's. Other browsers use similar ones.

• Destination: your printer, or Save as PDF to keep a file.
• Paper size: Letter in the US, A4 almost everywhere else.
• Margins: Default works. Minimum fits more on a page but pushes text toward the edge, where many home printers cut off.
• Scale: 90 to 100 percent reads well. Below about 85 the type gets small.
• Headers and footers: turn these off. They print the date, page title and web address in tiny type at the edges.
• Background graphics: turn this off to save ink.

Look through the preview before you print, and count the pages. If the count looks high, the comments are probably coming along too.

Step 4: Remove what you do not want

If reader mode is not available, or it kept things you do not want, trim the page by hand.

• Comments: they sit below the post. Find the page in the preview where the essay ends, then print only up to it. In Chrome, choose Custom under Pages and type a range such as 1-4.
• Images, subscribe boxes and share bars: right-click the thing you want gone and choose Inspect. In the panel that opens, right-click the highlighted line and choose Delete element. It disappears from the page, and from the printout. Reloading the page brings everything back.
• Everything at once: select the essay from its title to its last line, copy it, and paste it into a blank document as plain text. Images and buttons stay behind. So do italics and headings, which you then add back by hand.

Where this falls short

• It is one post at a time. Ten posts means ten rounds of the same settings.
• Reader mode is uneven. Some posts lose footnotes or captions. Others keep a subscribe box.
• The type is still a web page's. Lines run long, and page breaks land mid-paragraph or leave a heading alone at the bottom of a page.
• Embedded media does not translate. A video becomes a blank box or a still frame.
• Nothing holds the posts together. Each one is its own stack of pages.

What Postpile does differently

Postpile does this for a set of newsletters at once. You list the Substack newsletters you read, up to 10. We pick up to 6 essays from their recent free posts and lay them out as one designed magazine PDF: a cover with your name, letter-size pages made for a home printer, and every piece credited to its writer with a link to subscribe. Posts that do not work on paper, like podcasts and videos, are left out. Paid posts are never included. You print it yourself, at home or anywhere else.

Your first two issues are free. See how the printable magazine works. If you only want one post on paper, the steps above will do the job.