Mkdocs Page to PDF

An Mkdocs plugin to generate a PDF file for each MkDocs page using pyppeteer (chrome headless) and add a download button.

How to use

Install the package with pip:

pip install mkdocs-page-pdf

Enable the plugin in your mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  # - ...
    - page-to-pdf # should be last

Options

To set different options use the following syntax.

plugins:
  # - ...
    - page-to-pdf :
        # Options here

• disable (bool): Disable pdf rendering useful to quickly disable it without removing the plugin config. Defaults to False.
• disableOnServe (bool): Disable pdf rendering when using mkdocs serve. Defaults to False.

The following options are directly induced from pyppeteer options :

• scale (float): Scale of the webpage rendering, defaults to 1.0.
• displayHeaderFooter (bool): Display header and footer. Defaults to False.
• headerTemplate (str): HTML template for the print header. Should be valid HTML markup with following classes.
  • date: formatted print date
  • title: document title
  • url: document location
  • pageNumber: current page number
  • totalPages: total pages in the document
• footerTemplate (str): HTML template for the print footer. Should be valid HTML markup with the same classes as headerTemplate.
• printBackground (bool): Print background graphics. Defaults toFalse.
• landscape (bool): Paper orientation. Defaults to False.
• pageRanges (string): Paper ranges to print, e.g., '1-5,8,11-13'. Defaults to empty string, which means all pages.
• format (str): Paper format. Defaults to A4.
• margin (dict): Paper margins.
  • top (str): Top margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
  • right (str): Right margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
  • bottom (str): Bottom margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
  • left (str): Left margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
• pageLoadOptions (dict): Page load options (see this).
  • timeout (int): Maximum time in milliseconds, defaults to 30000.
  • waitUntil (str): When to consider navigation succeeded, defaults to load.
• exclude (list) : List of glob pattern to exclude

Troubleshooting

Running in a docker container (ci/cd)

Depending on what image you are using you may encounter some issue running pyppeteer : Browser closed unexpectedly This is due to some missing shared librairies used by Chrome Headless.

Related issue : pyppeteer/pyppeteer#194
See this article and this guide
Ready-to-use docker image : https://github.com/brospars/docker-mkdocs

Slow build on serve

You can use disable or disableOnServe options to disable the pdf rendering (entirely or on serve) but you can also use the mkdocs serve --dirtyreload flag to only rebuild modified files on the fly.

Blank page at the end

Due to a chrome bug a blank page can appear at the end of the PDF you can remove it by addin the following to you extra.css :

body {
    contain: strict;
}

Special thanks

This plugin was inspired by mkdocs-with-pdf and mkdocs-pdf-export-plugin but without using weasyprint and instead pyppeteer (chrome headless) to have a render closer to what you have in your chrome browser.