Export to PDF

After enabling the print-site plugin in your mkdocs.yml, exporting to PDF is as simple as browsing to /print_page or /print_page.html (url depends on your mkdocs setting use_directory_urls). From your browser you can use File > Print > Save as PDF.

If you want to automatically create PDFs of your mkdocs website, you can automate the process using a headless chrome plugin.

If you need more control over the PDF layout, I recommend the mkdocs-with-pdf plugin.

Avoid creating PDFs with Firefox

Firefox has some issues with print margins cutting of content, and anchors links not working properly. For more details see mkdocs-print-site-plugin#56

Automated export using nodejs and chrome

We can use nodejs together with the puppeteer headless chrome node.js package:

• Install nodejs
• Download puppeteer in the root of your project using the node package manager: npm i --save puppeteer
• Save the script export_to_pdf.js (see below) in the root of your project
• Start a webserver with your site (mkdocs serve)
• In a separate terminal window, you can now run the PDF export with url (to your print page), pdfPath (name of output file) and title arguments:

node export_to_pdf.js http://localhost:8000/print_page.html out.pdf 'title'

export_to_pdf.js

// Credits for script: https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template/blob/master/source/pdf/print.js
// Requires: npm i --save puppeteer

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
var args = process.argv.slice(2);
var url = args[0];
var pdfPath = args[1];
var title = args[2];

console.log('Saving', url, 'to', pdfPath);

// date –  formatted print date
// title – document title
// url  – document location
// pageNumber – current page number
// totalPages – total pages in the document
headerHtml = `
<div style="font-size: 10px; padding-right: 1em; text-align: right; width: 100%;">
    <span>${title}</span>  <span class="pageNumber"></span> / <span class="totalPages"></span>
</div>`;

footerHtml = ` `;


(async() => {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        headless: true,
        executablePath: process.env.CHROME_BIN || null,
        args: ['--no-sandbox', '--headless', '--disable-gpu', '--disable-dev-shm-usage']
    });

    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
    await page.pdf({
        path: pdfPath, // path to save pdf file
        format: 'A4', // page format
        displayHeaderFooter: true, // display header and footer (in this example, required!)
        printBackground: true, // print background
        landscape: false, // use horizontal page layout
        headerTemplate: headerHtml, // indicate html template for header
        footerTemplate: footerHtml,
        scale: 1, //Scale amount must be between 0.1 and 2
        margin: { // increase margins (in this example, required!)
            top: 80,
            bottom: 80,
            left: 30,
            right: 30
        }
    });

    await browser.close();
})();