Can you use AI to transform your website content into PDF bookazines? That was the question we asked ourselves. After all, AI tools can generate images and videos, remove backgrounds, and just about every kind of design process you can imagine.

With businesses investing so much in producing content for websites, we began wondering how organizations can repurpose and re-use existing articles into new formats such as PDF publications that give readers a deep dive on a single topic.

Now, nothing will beat a proper page layout designer like InDesign or Affinity - but for those who lack the time or experience designing publications, AI seems like a good bet. What we wanted to create was a smart professional bookazine that can help build brand authority or even be used as a lead-generation tool.

Of course, text-based chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini might dominate the AI-sphere. But when it comes to design, they're completely out of running (although we did try both, just to see what happened). And while Gemini's Storybook tool seems like it should be able to produce a PDF - on a technical level at least - it completely failed, too.

But we found a number of different AI tools out there that can effectively automate the process, taking your content and serving it up in a glossy bookazine format. Depending on the final output, these 4 AI tools offer a range of strengths and weaknesses, with the trade-off typically sitting between ease-of-use and creative control.

Here’s how you can create different types of bookazine publications using a range of free AI tools.

Overview

Getting started

The start of the process will be the same whichever tool you go for: select your content and write your prompt. We chose the ‘How to choose an office chair’ how-to guide as our test content. While some tools will pull the content directly from a web URL, many struggle, so we also copied the text from the article into a blank document and saved the images, ensuring that all the content was available in a simple format.

Any regular AI users will know that output is only ever as good as the prompt you provide. We wanted something simple but specific, which gave clear instructions about content and design requirements. When tailoring the prompt to suit your own needs, think about who your audience is and how you want the final product to look and feel.

The prompt

This is the AI prompt we used to get the best results from each of the tools we tested.

Creating a polished PDF brochure with Lovable

Out of all the tools tested, Lovable did the best job of taking the existing content and reformatting it as a Bookazine. It took the brand colours from the TechRadar Pro website without any additional prompting, used the images that we provided and didn’t rewrite the content – in short, it followed the prompt to the letter without any handholding from its human supervisor.

The output was not as flashy as some of our other tested platforms, but with minimal input and only around 15 minutes of thinking time, it produced a very solid document.

To use Lovable, you’ll need to start by signing up for a free account. You can also choose to upgrade to a paid version, which will allow you to get things done a little quicker, and also provide additional team collaboration features. We were able to get everything we needed from the free version.

Once you’re in, you’ll see a familiar chat interface reminiscent of most popular AI chatbots. Simply paste your prompt in and it will get straight to work with building you a first draft. Lovable was one of the tools that managed to pull content directly from the website, so you shouldn’t even need to upload your text and images separately. In our experience, this is the time to go and refill your coffee – but after around 10-20 minutes, you should have something to review.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that the immediate output was very strong, matching the TechRadar Pro branding and using the content we’d provided without any unwelcome embellishments. The formatting wasn’t perfect, and we felt the document could be made a little more interesting and attention grabbing.

These little tweaks are where Lovable excels, as the chatbot format means you can simply start to have a conversation with it about what changes you would like to see, and it will get to work making the refinements. In the free plan, you are limited to five message credits per day – if you need more but don’t wish to upgrade, try and offer multiple changes in one message, or expect to come back over several days.

In total, we only went through three small sets of changes before getting a Bookazine that we were happy with. The PDF can then be downloaded directly from the site.

Verdict

Lovable is the closest we came to a full automated bookazine creator. It excelled at following our prompt, understanding the TechRadar Pro brand and giving us tools to refine the output. However, limited free message credits could get frustrating, and you won’t get much creative control compared to traditional design software.

It’s worth mentioning that Lovable’s is first and foremost a no-code app development tool, so its uses extend far beyond what we’ve outlined in the steps above. Read our review of Lovable to find out more about what it offers.

Developing a highly customizable template with Canva

Canva’s attempt at following the same prompt was not as immediately polished as Lovable, but what it lacks in design-eye, it makes up for in ease of customization. With Canva, you can quickly create the skeleton of your document and then fill in the finer details to make sure it’s on brand and engaging for your audience.

Much like the other tools we’ve tested, you don’t need a paid Canva account to access its AI features – although a pro plan will give you more tokens, allowing you to engage with the AI system for longer and refine your document more effectively. Either way, the process is the same: select the Canva AI icon in the left-hand menu and paste your prompt into the large chat box. We did find that for Canva it was necessary to upload the text as a document, and give Canva some specific information about branding colours and style, as it wasn’t able to pull information directly from the website.

The system will think for a few minutes, and then start generating your document. One thing we liked about Canva compared to the other tools we used was that you could see its work in progress: each section appeared bit by bit on the screen, allowing you to track what it was doing. As with Lovable, you get a chat menu at the side that not only lets you refine the design by giving Canva’s AI new instructions but also gives a Canva a space to explain its work.

We weren’t overwhelmed by the initial layout created: it was clean and easy to read, but lacked images and played it safe with the style. A more specific prompt may elicit funkier design work – or, for those who want to have a little more control over the final product, this is an opportunity to take over and finish the bookazine yourself.

Anyone familiar with Canvas tools will love the next part. The design that’s created using Canva AI can be modified and manipulated with ease using all of Canva’s usual functionality, meaning you’re free to add photos and graphics, change the layout or swap colours and fonts until you’re satisfied.

This is why we think that Canva AI is best placed for putting together a customizable template, rather than a polished final version. By giving you a draft to work from, it has the potential to save hours of time. More excitingly, with Canva’s renewed focus on AI and the Canva 2.0 upgrade currently being rolled out, it’s a safe bet that this will become even more powerful in the near future.

Verdict

Canva is the best option for teams that still want hands-on design control. The familiar interface will be a plus for existing Canva users, as will the strong manual editing tools. However, we found that the initial AI layout was quite generic – making this better as a starting point than a final product. Check out our Canva review for more features.

Producing a simple, interactive booklet using FlipHTML5

If the objective is to create a no-frills, browsable online booklet then you might want to turn to FlipHTML5, a platform that takes your content and puts it into a very user-friendly flipbook format. Unlike Lovable, it offers little on the design front, however it still presents a good option for information such as a manual or technical guide – anything where the objective is to convey information rather than to present a strong brand.

As before, you’ll need to start by setting yourself up with a free account. On FlipHTML5, pulling content from a URL source is a pro feature, so you’ll need to choose the upload option, and upload the content as a document. You can include the text and images together in one doc.

In just a few minutes, your information will be converted into an interactive HTML brochure, with a dedicated URL that you can direct people to. Not quite a PDF booklet, but extremely user-friendly and accessible. There are options to make small tweaks to the heading and formatting and, if you choose to upgrade to a pro account, you can also add additional design options such as company branding.

Overall, this is a no-bells-and-whistles approach – but it does have its strengths. We were very impressed with how clearly the information was displayed and could see this working well for documents such as product manuals or employee training guides. The final product took just a few minutes to produce, so if you’re not happy with the outcome then very little time will be wasted.

For those who do find FlipHTML5 suitable for their needs, there are two paid plans available that may be worth considering. Although the free version offers everything you need to create a booklet, there are some helpful enhanced features bundled into the Pro, Platinum and Enterprise plans including analytics to help you track performance, custom domains and the opportunity to include ad banners or connect with Google AdSense.

Verdict

FlipHTML5 works best for functional documents rather than brand storytelling, but that still means there’s a place for it in the corporate world. We liked the extremely fast turnaround, interactive format, and very simple workflow. However, the lack of creative flexibility and lack of customization options for free users means that this will only work for limited use cases.

Repurposing your article into a PDF presentation with Gamma

Gamma.app is primarily a tool for creating AI-powered presentations, but it can also work with existing content and create downloadable documents for you to share with your readers.

This cuts the text down to just the most important key points and presents them as a series of easily digested cards. It’s a great way to get information across rapidly and would be well suited for creating snappy primer documents that give readers an overview of a topic before they decide whether they want to dive in and read a longer article.

As with the previous tools, getting started with Gamma was remarkably simple. After setting up a free account, hit the Create New [AI] button and choose the ‘paste in text’ option. This will open up the prompt window, so you can copy and paste your prompt in directly – no need to upload anything. There are a few additional options you can play around with here to further customize your results, although we found that the default settings worked well.

Gamma will then produce a series of cards that cut your content down into bitesize, digestible chunks. If you want to change the overall look and feel of the deck then you can select a new theme or, alternatively, each card can be edited individually. The software didn’t manage to pull images from our article, however the photos it selected instead could be easily changed. It also added its own graphics and diagrams, which worked well to break up the content and offer a more visual presentation style.

Once completed, the Gamma can be shared directly as a slideshow presentation or exported to use as a PDF document.

Verdict

Gamma sits somewhere between a slide deck creator and lightweight publishing platform. It offered an excellent visual presentation style, strong summarization skills and a good use of graphics and diagrams. However, some may find that it oversimplifies long-form content, making it less suitable for detailed editorial publications.

So, can AI turn your content into a reader-ready bookazine?

So, can AI turn your content into a reader-ready bookazine? Well, after hours of testing various different - including other tools like Google Gemini's Storybook and Figma (neither of which delivered the goods) the answer is...

Yes and no.

None of the platforms we tested - even the best ones above - could completely replace a professional designer or editor, but they did dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to turn existing web content into something more polished and usable.

The best choice will ultimately depend on what you’re trying to create and how much time you can dedicate to it, but if you’re willing to experiment then you should be happy with the final results.

How we tested the AI tools to create a PDF bookazine

The testing process was fairly straightforward. First, we created a shortlist of potential platforms, focusing on tools that specifically offered AI-powered document, presentation, or publication design features.

We looked for services that could either generate layouts automatically from prompts or import long-form content and restructure it into a magazine-style format. Accessibility was also important, so we prioritized tools with free tiers or trials that anyone could realistically test for themselves.

Once we had our shortlist, we created free accounts for each platform and ran a shorter version of what would become the final prompt to test their overall functionality, ease of use, and output quality. This initial stage helped us identify which tools could successfully interpret our instructions, preserve formatting, and generate visually coherent layouts without extensive manual intervention.

After narrowing down the list, we used the full prompt and source article across each platform to compare results more consistently. We assessed each tool on several key areas: how accurately it followed the brief, how well it handled long-form content, the quality of the visual layout, branding consistency, image placement, font choices, and the amount of editing required after generation.

We also paid close attention to practical considerations such as export options, page limits and watermarking on free plans. Some platforms excelled at speed and automation but offered limited creative control, while others required more manual input but delivered more polished and flexible results.

While no tool produced a completely publication-ready bookazine without some level of editing, several came surprisingly close, particularly when given clear prompts and well-structured source content.

We put over 70 of the best AI tools to the test