How To Create PDFs With The Wikipedia PDF Converter

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If you’re a Wikipedia user who’s tried to save an article in the PDF format, then you know that the results aren’t too great. You simply get a snapshot of a saved HTML page in a PDF viewer, give or take a few a few re-formatting touches here and there.

Well, you can actually get better PDF quality by converting Wikipedia articles with the Print/export feature that creates PDFs from Wikipedia articles and WikiBooks.

Now you may be thinking that converting an HTML page into PDF is nothing new. It’s something you can do with any HTML to PDF conversion software out there. However, what sticks out about this feature is that the PDF conversion is especially made for Wikipedia articles.

WikiTypeThis means you get a clean re-formatted PDF without the webpage formatting you get in your browser and, then in your PDF via conversion. Web page elements like side menus, edit links, banners and bulleted links, get neatly reformatted or eliminated to give you a document-like appearance for your PDF.

If you need a Wikipedia article in proper PDF appearance, simply click on the Print/export link in the lefthand side, copy the URL of the wiki page, paste it into the interface and submit. The generated PDF will be set up with an official title page, a properly formatted table of contents, professional headers and footers, PDF bookmarks and page numbers.

Be warned though that included in your PDF is a 5 page GNU documentation license at the end of the article and a single GNU publication page at the beginning (after the title page). You’ll end up with a few extra pages you didn’t expect. Other than that, WikiType comes in handy for reading those Wiki documents offline in a readable format.