Printing & PDF

A note, on paper — and the same thing your reader gets from an article on your site.

Ctrl/Cmd Alt P prints the open note, or exports it to PDF, through your browser's own print dialog. The command palette carries the same row, Print / Export PDF…, and on the desktop app it is File → Print / Export PDF….

It is Alt P and not the Ctrl/Cmd P every other application prints with, because in Astrolabe that chord has been the command palette since the first release, and Ctrl/Cmd Shift P publishes the open note. Neither of those was worth moving. On the public blog nothing is swallowed at all: a visitor's own Ctrl/Cmd P is the browser's, and it produces the same pages.

What comes out


The document, whole	Not the screen. The app prints a freshly rendered copy of the note, so what lands on the page is the whole note — including the part you had scrolled past, and the body of a callout you had folded shut.
Paper colours	A light, parchment-cast palette, whatever theme you read in. Your theme is a property of the screen; the page is white because paper is.
A real serif page	11pt serif (the kind of type printed books use) on A4 or Letter with 20/25mm margins. The page is the full width of the text — there is no narrower column drawn inside it.
Sensible breaks	A heading never ends a page on its own, callouts, tables, figures, tracker cards and equations do not split, paragraphs keep three lines on either side of a break, and a table that runs over repeats its header row.
Footnotes at the end, under a hairline, as they are on screen.
Links that make sense on paper	An external link prints its address beside it. A `[[wikilink]]` prints as the words you wrote — it points into a vault the person holding the sheet does not have.
A right-to-left page for a right-to-left note	Margins, list markers, quotation bars and table column order all mirror, from an English instance as readily as from an Arabic one.

What a PDF gets that most exports do not

Bookmarks. Your headings become the PDF's outline, the contents a reader shows in its side panel, because the reading view writes real headings (h1–h6) and every one carries an id.
Working internal links. A footnote number, its return arrow, and a [[#Heading]] link inside the same note are real links to places on the page, which Chrome turns into links inside the PDF. Click a footnote number in the exported PDF and it goes to the footnote.
Selectable text and real maths. KaTeX renders to glyphs, not pictures.

For a PDF, choose Save as PDF (or Print to file) as the destination in the print dialog. If you want the callout tints, the highlight marks and the banner in the file, leave Background graphics on; Astrolabe only asks the printer for ink where the colour is carrying meaning.

What is left off

The frontmatter properties card. It is the note's filing card, not its content (id, publish and the dg-* keys say nothing to somebody holding paper), and the published blog has always hidden it for the same reason. A banner: picture is the note's own and stays, clamped to 55mm so it does not eat a third of the first sheet. A blog article's generated gradient banner, the placeholder for a picture the author never chose, is dropped.

Printing a published article

Nothing to configure. Open the piece on your site and print it: the masthead, the topic nav, the share row, previous/next, related writings, the comment thread and the back-to-top button all step aside, and the title, byline, hero and body print exactly as the reader sees them. That page needs no JavaScript from us to do it, which is the point: the person printing your writing is usually not you.

If nothing seems to print

Printing from the graph view or the empty state prints one line saying so, because there is no document on screen to print. Open a note first.

Under the hood: client/reading/print.css is the whole @media print answer, and client/print.ts decides which document is on the paper. npm run check-print (Development) is the gate that keeps both honest — a print stylesheet is the one surface no screenshot ever shows.