How To Create a PDF From Almost Any App On Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create a PDF from almost any app on your iPhone. 

When you're getting work done in different apps from time to time you want to be able to export to PDF. On a Mac it's pretty easy to do so even if the app doesn't support an Export to PDF function. On the iPhone you can do the same but you have to know where to look. 

So you may have an app on your iPhone, like say Pages. Pages has a built-in export function right here. You can export as a PDF. But not all apps have that. For instance, in Mail here if you're looking at a message you won't find any Export as PDF function here. But it's there. You just need to know where to look. The key is to always look for the Print function. Now in an app like Mail it's kind of hard to find. Usually you find it in the Share Button. But here you've got this little Reply button here. But the Reply Button actually has Print in it here. So if you select Print, you go to the Print interface and you don't see any Export as PDF here either. But if you know where to look it's there! 

The main way to get to it today, using iOS26 and newer, is to look for the Share Button there. Tap that and then scroll down there and look for Save to Files. When I tap there it brings up a File Browser and I can now browse to where I want to Save to File. Here I'll put it in my Documents Folder. I also have at the bottom here the ability to tap on this and change the name of the file. Then I can tap Save and it will save the file as a PDF. There's no mention of PDF there. But if I go to the Files App here and I look where I saved it I'll see it there. You can see it's a PDF file.

Now let's look at doing it in Safari. Say you're on a Safari page and you want to save this as a PDF. So there's no obvious Share button here either but you can get to it many ways. Just look at the different options you've got. For instance the three dots button usually gives you more options. Once you bring that up you've got Share. So now you're going to look here and you won't see any Export as PDF and you won't even see a Save To File function. But you will find Print. So use Print. It brings you into that same Print interface. You can now tap on Share here at the top instead of actually printing and then go to Save To File. Then Save this out as well. Now here I see that PDF file created from the webpage right there in my Files App. 

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Here's one more example just to show how you can use this pretty much any place you can print. If you go into the Photos App here and let's say I want to include a few photos as a PDF to send to somebody as a single file. I can select those. I can go to the Share button, which is a typical place to be able to find the Print functionality here. Then I can select Print. Note that whenever you're doing this the actual PDF is already shown to you right here. That preview is essentially a preview either what you're going to print or what you're going to save as a PDF. So you can make sure you have what you want. Then once you're happy with that you can tap here to Share and in the case of photos here it's got some work to do. It's going to compress the photos into a PDF. Now that we're here instead of actually printing I'm just going to use Save To File and then save this out. I have the chance here to rename it just as before. Now you can see that PDF has appeared here in the Files App. You can see here I've got those three photos inside of a PDF now. 

Let's do it in the Notes App. I'm going to show you an alternative way to get to this that gives you another option. So I'm going to use the Share button here and then I'm going to View More and find Print. Now, I could tap here and then use Save To File. But I could also, at this point, use the Preview Icon here to open up the PDF in Preview. That gives me an extra step. I can look at the PDF in Preview and decide to save it from the Preview App. Also to get to the same place you can use two fingers and pinch out and do that on the Preview at the bottom here. When you expand it you get an expanded preview. Here you could tap the Preview Button at the bottom to go directly to the Preview App. Or you could tap here at the top and Save To File. Now this method has worked longer than the current method so you maybe used to it already. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use it now and you may also just like being able to view it as a larger preview before deciding to Save it as a file. 

So now you've got a way to save PDF's out of almost any app, even if the app doesn't have an export function. It just needs a Print function which can be a problem in some cases. For instance the News App doesn't let you print news articles so there's no way to actually save out a news article as a PDF. Maps is another app that doesn't support printing. But you can always take a screenshot and you could just save the screenshot as a regular file. But you could also save it as a PDF. If you take a screenshot, like I'll do it just here of the Home screen, then you've got a way up here at the top to tap the Share button. Then you can do Print and then save this out as a PDF using Save To File. 

As you can see there are a few different paths you can take. But generally if you can print from an app you can create a PDF from an app. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.