Need posibillity to print articles from knowledge base

I'd like to be able to generate clean PDFs of KBs to send to customers who haven't yet registered for the help center. The browser's print feature isn't quite clean enough.

Does this post help: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/204133846-Printing-PDF-Emailing-Help-Center-Articles

Hi Colin,

Thanks. The print option works well, but the PDF does not include the images. I could just allow the print option and then print to PDF. What has been your experience with PDFs and images?

Also, the pull-right div was ignored. This was in Firefox for Windows.

Jim

Hi Colin.  I am also experiencing the same issues as Jim exactly.  The pdf ability is very important to our userbase.  

The pull-right was also ignored and I am using Chrome on Windows.

It would be great to have a resolution around these.

Thanks,

Jason

Hi Colin.

The soultion With Print Friendly isn`t good enogh generating images and also include Adds. This isn`t Professional.

We also are in same situation as Jason. Even if we do not want to we can be forced to skip Zendesk since we can`t print articles from KB.

Hi Johannes, you might want to check out the Knowledge Base to PDF app  . It enables you to export parts of your help center as a PDF, it keeps your images, and it does not add ads. 

We would like this functionality also. We are using zendesk to support a survey based registry and can create an article with the instructions/help text for each question in the survey, but there is no way for users to print the instructions into one comprehensive document. If we want to use the functionality of associate an article with a specific question, then we are forced to maintain instructions in two places, Zendesk articles and a Word document that we can provide to users who want a comprehensive set of instructions.

Our users are also pushing for the ability to print KB articles for training and/or print to follow more complex sets of instructions. 

The Knowledge Base to PDF app appears to allow an agent/admin to create a PDF document, but not adhoc requests by customers.

Our customer expectation is for there to be an option to create a printer friendly or PDF on individual KB articles. 

The resulting export formatting when implementing the Printer Friendly workaround in Printing PDF Emailing Help Center Articles was unfortunately not complete.

Can someone from Zendesk please confirm if an enhancement to allow customers to print or export KB articles to PDF is on the development roadmap?

Hey Jason,

not speaking for Zendesk here, but I released the Knowledge Base to PDF app: We're currently in the process of publishing an app that will enable your users to ad-hoc download a PDF of your knowledge base articles & sections with a print option embedded in your theme. 

Everything we have tried to do has worked for an admin or agent to print, but not for our end users. Hopefully Zendesk will soon review your app, Patrick, as we have a major need for this and have yet to find a solution that works for our end users. 

This works, "Knowledge Print  PDF Download Controls" in the Marketplace. It adds PDF icon button on all articles where users are given the ability to export just the article of the entire section; but not the entire KB.

I also installed the other as mentioned above. I use that one to export the entire KB.

I am not a html, css, or js expert, but my only issue is the Headings in the exported pdf are red, I can't figure out what is causing this or how to fix; they are black in the Guide UI.

I have to say, this is one of the missing functions with Zendesk that surprised me the most. It seems like such basic functionality. We have several customers asking why they can't easily and cleanly print a Knowledge Base article. I'm really hoping this is implemented very soon! Thanks!

I tried out the app in the Market Place and it appears it is for agents only. I am looking for the ability for our customers to be able to print a KB article with images themselves. We keep getting support tickets from customers asking us to print articles for them. We then need to print the article, scan it, and attach it to the ticket. Seems a bit ridiculous but we only get the images to show up if we print the article instead of saving it as a PDF. 

As a company that tries to be as paperless as possible, I completely understand why this sounds unnecessary. I wish that our customers did not feel the need to print out so many things, but the bottom line is that they do have this need (or maybe just desire) and we need to be able to provide it to them. We are really trying to focus on self-help this year and when a customer needs to make a ticket to ask us to print out something because they can't it defeats the purpose of self-help. 

Hey Maggie,

have you checked out the "Knowledge Print: PDF Download Controls" app from the marketplace? It does exactly what you're describing: it adds a PDF download button to your knowledge base so your customers can download articles or whole sections as PDF on their own

I installed it, but it looked like it was only for the agents. I will look at it further. Thanks! 

Hey All,

I wanted to weigh in here. Historically, the formatting of printing HTML documents has been offloaded to the duty of a print style sheet that's included in the page. You can achieve the desired result of printing a knowledge base article by including print specific styles into your theme via theme customizations. Here's some more information on that.

I spent a little time with my test account based on the Copenhagen theme and this would give you a simple start to being able to provide special print styles to your theme. It's not perfect, and you'll likely have to go through your theme depending on your customization and test out what you need to hide (or even include) in your theme.

@media print {
 .header, .footer, .sub-nav, .article-comments, .article-relatives, .article-sidebar, .article-subscribe, .article-votes, .article-footer, .container-divider, .article-return-to-top
 {
 display: none;
 }
}

You could even add a button the theme that calls some JavaScript like 

window.print();

And you'd have a printable page from your knowledge base.

Thanks!