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