Exporting PDFs
Any document becomes a PDF with one click, laid out in pages with the theme's cover, headers and footers.
Export
Click Export PDF at the top of the window. The PDF is saved in your Downloads folder and opens straight away.
To see it before you export, click Paginated. That layout is the PDF: the same pages, the same breaks, the same headers and footers. You can keep writing in it.
The PDF uses whichever theme is showing. If you've picked another theme from the list at the top to try it out, that's the one you get.
The first export
Plicine needs a web browser's engine to draw the pages. If your computer has Chrome, Edge or Brave, it uses that. If it has none of them, the first export downloads a small renderer of its own (about 100 MB, once) and shows "Downloading the PDF renderer" with a percentage while it does. After that, exports start straight away.
Page size
PDFs are A4 or Letter. Choose in Vault settings, under Page size; Settings says where that is. The theme's leaves the choice to the theme, and a theme that doesn't say gets A4.
Starting a new page
Add a Page break block wherever a new page should start: type / on an empty line and pick it. In the infinite layout it shows as a labelled line marking where the break falls.
Covers, headers and footers
These belong to the theme. The built-in theme has a cover page and a footer; a theme made for your organisation will have its own.
A document only gets a cover when it asks for one, and at the moment that's a line of text, not a button. Click Source at the top of the window and put this at the very top of the document, above everything else:
---
cover: true
---
Press Cmd+S (Ctrl+S) to save and click Document to go back. If the document already starts with a pair of --- lines, add cover: true on a line of its own between them. The cover shows the document's title, and you can see it in Paginated.
The credit line
A PDF in the built-in theme ends with one small line at the foot of its last page: "Made with Plicine · plicine.com". It's there once, never on the cover, and it never adds a page. A theme someone made for you doesn't have it unless they chose to.
It's free to turn off. Open Vault settings and switch off "Made with Plicine" line. Nothing else about the PDF changes.
Links
A PDF holds one document, so what a link does in it depends on where the link goes.
| The link goes to | In the PDF |
|---|---|
| A website | It opens the website |
| A heading in the same document, the table of contents included | It jumps to that heading |
| Another document in your vault | Ordinary text, set like the words around it |
| A file in your vault | Ordinary text |
The other document isn't in the PDF, so a link to it would have nowhere to go, and the person you send the PDF to can't open your vault. The words of the link stay where they were. The rows of a Child pages block are links to documents, so they print as a plain list.
Paginated still shows these as links, because there a click opens the document. They become text when the PDF is made.
When a PDF looks wrong
- A plain placeholder where a block should be. The block is an add-on that hasn't been given a yes on this computer, so it didn't run. Go back to the document, choose Run in the panel above it and export again. Why a block asks before it runs explains the panel.
- A link does nothing. It goes to another document or a file in your vault, and the PDF doesn't hold those, so it's printed as text. Links has the rule.
- Something shows on screen but not in the PDF. Blocks draw themselves differently for paper, where nothing can be pointed at or clicked. Paginated shows you the paper version.
- The renderer won't download. This happens with no internet, or on an office network that blocks the download. Install Chrome or Edge and export again; Plicine uses it and skips the download.
- The export stops after a minute. Plicine gives a document 60 seconds to lay itself out. The message names what went wrong, which is usually one block. Try again, and if it keeps happening, take that block out to check.
- The type looks different on another computer. Themes should carry their own fonts. If yours borrows a font from the computer, a PDF made on a computer without it looks different. Tell whoever made the theme.
For technical readers: Exporting from the command line covers plicine export-pdf, exporting in a script, why two exports of the same document are identical, and choosing the browser yourself.