Reading ChatGPT responses as PDFs

I’ve been trying out ChatGPT deep research which is pretty handy for more in-depth research on a topic. Rather than just giving you an immediate response to a question, it goes away for about 5-10 minutes to search the web and then combines that research into a single article.

It’s not doing anything you couldn’t do yourself through a lot of Googling, but it does do it a lot faster and more conveniently. Rather than furiously Googling for three hours, you can ask the LLM to do it for you, go make a cup of tea, and then come back to the summarized result.

Reading a long, dense article on the ChatGPT website is not the best experience though. I’d much rather read it on my e-reader where I can also take notes. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to output PDFs from the ChatGPT site (and naive copy and pasting loses all the headings and document structure), so I’ve come up with a slightly hacky workaround 😅, but it works!

Steps

  1. Make sure you’re using the ChatGPT website (not the desktop app)
  2. In your browser’s HTML inspector, find the HTML element containing ChatGPT’s response
  3. Right click, and click “Copy as outer HTML”
  4. Paste that into a new HTML file
  5. Then run Pandoc to output that as a PDF:
pandoc cyprus.html -o cyprus.pdf

Job done!

Installation

You will probably also need to install pandoc and pdflatex if you haven’t already, which if you’re using a Mac you can do using homebrew:

brew install pandoc basictex

Unicode characters tip

One article it created for me had some maths equations in it, and the special characters weren’t being rendered at all by pandoc.

Unicode character κ (U+03BA) not set up for use with LaTeX.

To fix this, I found I could tell pandoc to use a system font which did have those characters (here I’m using SF Pro, which is a built-in font on Mac OS).

pandoc ... --pdf-engine=xelatex -V 'mainfont:SF Pro'