Help:Download as PDF

Wikipedia pages can be exported and saved as PDF files.

Creating a PDF

From 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 two columns. The last page(s) include "Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses" listing all of the contributors, "Images" listing all of the images used in the article, and "Content license" listing the article licensing.

Links within the article and to external sites are preserved.

If you have PDF software, you can use it to create a PDF which may give more control over the output.

Mobile devices will default to the Mobile view which does not include Download as PDF in the sidebar. To enable it, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Desktop.

PDF viewers

To view the PDF you must have a browser that directly supports PDF viewing or an application installed on your computer. 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 two columns; this cannot be changed
2. The table of contents is not rendered
3. Tables, including infoboxes, are not rendered; see T85777, T73296, T73311
4. Columns in the article are rendered as a single column within the PDF columns
5. Grouped references do not render; see T41095
6. Many CSS properties are ignored, causing template issues; see T32702,
   1. {{chem}}; see T42042
7. <ruby> elements do not render; see T23504
8. Long equations are overflowing

See T134205 for a method to generate PDF files proposed in May 2016.

Technical

PDFs are rendered by the Collection software extension, which in turn uses the PDF Writer extension.