9/21/2020 Help:Download as PDF - Wikipedia

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, as it has
not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

A free software alternative is MediaWiki2LaTeX (http://mediawiki2l

atex.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/mediawiki2latex).
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.

Contents
Creating a PDF
PDF viewers
Issues
Technical

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.
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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 round headless Chromium.

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This page was last edited on 6 July 2020, at 18:33 (UTC).

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