Printing & Exporting as PDF

Printing#

This feature allows printing of notes. It works on both the desktop client, but also on the web.

Note that not all note types are printable as of now. We do plan to increase the coverage of supported note types in the future.

To print a note, select the button to the right of the note and select Print note. Depending on the size and type of the note, this can take up to a few seconds. Afterwards you will be redirected to the system/browser printing dialog.

Reporting issues with the rendering#

Should you encounter any visual issues in the resulting PDF file (e.g. a table does not fit properly, there is cut off text, etc.) feel free to report the issue. In this case, it's best to offer a sample note (click on the button, select Export note → This note and all of its descendants → HTML in ZIP archive). Make sure not to accidentally leak any personal information.

Consider adjusting font sizes and using page breaks to work around the layout.

Exporting as PDF#

On the desktop application of Trilium it is possible to export a note as PDF. On the server or PWA (mobile), the option is not available due to technical constraints and it will be hidden.

To print a note, select the button to the right of the note and select Export as PDF. Afterwards you will be prompted to select where to save the PDF file.

Automatic opening of the file#

When the PDF is exported, it is automatically opened with the system default application for easy preview.

Note that if you are using Linux with the GNOME desktop environment, sometimes the default application might seem incorrect (such as opening in GIMP). This is because it uses Gnome's “Recommended applications” list.

To solve this, you can change the recommended application for PDFs via this command line. First, list the available applications via gio mime application/pdf and then set the desired one. For example to use GNOME's Evince:

gio mime application/pdf

Customizing exporting as PDF#

When exporting to PDF, there are no customizable settings such as page orientation, size. However, there are a few Attributes to adjust some of the settings:

• To print in landscape mode instead of portrait (useful for big diagrams or slides), add #printLandscape.
• By default, the resulting PDF will be in Letter format. It is possible to adjust it to another page size via the #printPageSize attribute, with one of the following values: A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, Legal, Letter, Tabloid, Ledger.

Keyboard shortcut#

It's possible to trigger both printing and export as PDF from the keyboard by going to Keyboard shortcuts in Options and assigning a key combination for:

• Print Active Note
• Export Active Note as PDF

Constraints & limitations#

Not all Note Types are supported when printing, in which case the Print and Export as PDF options will be disabled.

• For Code notes:
  • Line numbers are not printed.
  • Syntax highlighting is enabled, however a default theme (Visual Studio) is enforced.
• For Collections:
  • Only Presentation View is currently supported.
  • We plan to add support for all the collection types at some point.
• Using Custom app-wide CSS for printing is not longer supported, due to a more stable but isolated mechanism.
  • We plan to introduce a new mechanism specifically for a print CSS.

Under the hood#

Both printing and exporting as PDF use the same mechanism: a note is rendered individually in a separate webpage that is then sent to the browser or the Electron application either for printing or exporting as PDF.

The webpage that renders a single note can actually be accessed in a web browser. For example http://localhost:8080/#root/WWRGzqHUfRln/RRZsE9Al8AIZ?ntxId=0o4fzk becomes http://localhost:8080/?print#root/WWRGzqHUfRln/RRZsE9Al8AIZ.

Accessing the print note in a web browser allows for easy debugging to understand why a particular note doesn't render well. The mechanism for rendering is similar to the one used in Note List.