Pages Printing and Export

Pages, Printing and Export

Page view

By default the document sits on a fixed-width sheet of whole US Letter pages, floating on a canvas — the way a word processor shows a page. Everything is confined to the sheet's width, tables included, instead of stretching to fill the window. A rule is drawn across the sheet where each page ends.

The sheet is always a whole number of pages tall: it shows a full page even when your document is shorter than one, and gains its next page as soon as the content outgrows the last.

Turn page view off (the page icon's dropdown) and the document simply fills the pane as a plain editing surface. Either way the file is identical — this is presentation only.

Page breaks mark, they do not repaginate. The rule on the sheet shows where a page ends; it does not push the content after it onto the next page. For true pagination, use Print preview.

Page setup

The same dropdown sets orientation and margins:

Portrait	8.5 × 11 inches (the default)
Landscape	11 × 8.5 inches

Margin preset
Normal	1 inch all round (the default)
Narrow	0.5 inch all round
Moderate	1 inch top and bottom, 0.75 inch left and right
Wide	1 inch top and bottom, 2 inches left and right
Custom…	Your own four values, in inches

One page setup governs every paged surface — the sheet on screen, the print preview, and the printed page — so what you see is what prints. It is an editor-wide preference, kept across runs, and not part of any document. Cancelling the custom margins prompt changes nothing.

US Letter is the only page size.

Print preview

Ctrl+Shift+P, or Print preview in the export menu. It shows the document laid out into the very pages printing would produce, truly paginated under your current page setup, with a Print button beside it.

Folded sections are previewed and printed in full — printing means the whole document, never only the part you happen to be looking at.

Printing

Ctrl+P, or Print in the export menu. On Windows, choosing Microsoft Print to PDF in the print dialog is the highest-fidelity way to get a PDF, since it prints the document exactly as it appears on screen.

Export as HTML

Export as HTML… asks where to save and in which of two shapes:

Shape	What you get
Standalone page	A complete HTML document — a title and an embedded stylesheet — that stands on its own in a browser
HTML fragment	The content alone, for pasting into a page that supplies its own surroundings

Both carry the same content and differ only in what surrounds it. Mermaid diagrams render in the exported page.

Export as PDF

Export as PDF… writes a PDF, with the diagrams rendered as pictures. Its content is re-laid-out from the Markdown, so it need not match the on-screen document line for line — for an exact match, print to PDF instead.

Copying out

• Copy (Ctrl+C) puts rich text on the clipboard, so a paste into Word, Outlook, Gmail, Google Docs or Slack keeps its formatting.
• Copy as Markdown (Ctrl+Shift+C) puts the source on the clipboard instead. A partial selection copies the whole blocks it touches.

A note on all of these

Exporting, previewing, printing and copying all read the document. None of them writes to the file you are editing.

Next

• Tables
• Panels and Layout