 | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
 | A free software alternative is MediaWiki2LaTeX. It works with any website running MediaWiki, like Wikipedia and Wikibooks. It may be used online or installed locally. |
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
editBrowse 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
editTo 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
edit- PDFs are rendered in a single full-width column; this cannot be changed
- The table of contents is included
- Tables, including most infoboxes, are rendered. Some small types of box used for local on-wiki information are omitted.
- Images and galleries are rendered
- Long equations are overflowing
- The "Download as PDF" option might not appear when using a custom theme on Wikipedia on some desktop web browsers.
Technical
editPDFs are rendered by the Proton rendering service, see its pages on MediaWiki and on Phabricator. Proton itself is built around headless Chromium.