Help:Download as PDF

This help page is a how-to guide.

It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's
norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines,
and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

A free software alternative is MediaWiki2LaTeX (http://mediawi

ki2latex.wmflabs.org/). It works with any website running
MediaWiki, like Wikipedia and Wikibooks. It may be used online
or installed locally (https://packages.debian.org/mediawiki2late
x).
For Help with collections of articles, see Help:Books.
You can export a Wikipedia page such as an article and save it as a PDF file in several ways:

Some web browsers allow you to simply Save As... or Print to PDF.
Wikipedia's inbuilt Download as PDF option.
Other PDF software can be used to create a PDF from the web page, which may give more
control over the output.
This page offers help with Wikipedia's download tool.

Creating a PDF
Browse to the page you want to download. Make sure you have Desktop view selected. Mobile
devices which default to the Mobile view do not display the required options; to switch to
Desktop view, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Desktop.

In the left sidebar, under Print/export select Download as PDF. The rendering engine starts
and a dialog appears to show the rendering progress. When rendering is complete, the dialog
shows "The document file has been generated. Download the file to your computer." Click the
download link to open the PDF in your selected PDF viewer.

PDFs are rendered in a single full-width column. At the end are added:

The url of the page

The time and date at which the page was last modified
Copyright licensing information
Links within the article and to external sites are preserved. They are not highlighted, but your
device's user interface will typically indicate when you are hovering over a link.

PDF viewers
To view the PDF you must have a browser or other application which directly supports PDF
viewing. For browser support, see Comparison of web browsers § Image format support. For
PDF applications, see List of PDF software.

Issues
For more information, see the list of bugs on Phabricator
1. PDFs are rendered in a single full-width column; this cannot be changed
2. The table of contents is included
3. Tables, including most infoboxes, are rendered. Some small types of box used for local on-
wiki information are omitted.
4. Images and galleries are rendered
5. Long equations are overflowing
6. The "Download as PDF" option might not appear when using a custom theme on Wikipedia
on some desktop web browsers.

Technical
PDFs are rendered by the Proton rendering service, see its pages on MediaWiki and on
Phabricator. Proton itself is built around headless Chromium.

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