How to Save a Google Doc as a PDF (Every Way That Works)
Download, email, or print a Google Doc as a PDF from your computer or phone, plus fixes for broken formatting and margins.
Google Docs can turn any document into a PDF in about three clicks, but the option is buried in a menu most people never open, and the mobile app hides it somewhere else entirely. Here is every way to do it, plus fixes for the two things that most often go wrong: mangled margins and missing fonts.
On a computer: File > Download
- Open your document in Google Docs.
- Click File in the menu bar (the one inside Docs, not your browser's).
- Hover over Download.
- Choose PDF Document (.pdf).
The PDF lands in your Downloads folder, named after the document. That's genuinely all there is to it. What you see in Docs is what you get in the PDF, page breaks and all.
Emailing the PDF without downloading it first
If the whole point is to send the PDF to someone, skip the download. Go to File > Email > Email this file, and Docs will attach itself to an email as a PDF. Handy on a work machine where you don't want stray files piling up in Downloads.
On your phone
The Google Docs app on iPhone and Android does this too, just less obviously:
- Open the document and tap the ⋯ menu in the top corner.
- Tap Share & export.
- Tap Send a copy, then choose PDF.
- Pick where it goes: save to Files/Drive, or share straight into an email or chat.
On Android there's also Save as > PDF in the same menu, which writes the file to your phone instead of sharing it.
When the PDF doesn't look like your document
Two problems come up again and again.
Margins and page breaks are off
Docs formats to a page size, and if your document is set to A4 but you (or the person you sent it to) expect US Letter, everything shifts. Check File > Page setup before downloading and match the size to whatever the PDF will be printed on. Pageless documents are the other trap: a pageless Doc has no page breaks at all, so Docs invents them at download time. Switch to Pages mode first if the breaks matter.
Fonts look different
If you used a font from the extended Google Fonts list, the PDF embeds it fine. But if the document came from Word originally and uses a font Docs doesn't have, Docs substituted it on screen, and the PDF keeps the substitute. There's no fix inside Docs other than picking a font it actually owns.
Need to tweak the PDF afterwards?
A downloaded PDF is frozen: fix a typo and you have to re-download the whole thing, which is annoying when the Doc belongs to someone else. For small corrections it's quicker to edit the PDF directly.
Our editor runs entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine. You can fix text, white-out a line, or drop a signature on the last page. For other post-download chores: merge several exported Docs into one file, or compress the result if image-heavy pages made it bulky.
The reverse trip: PDF back to Google Docs
Going the other way (opening a PDF as an editable Doc) is a different, messier process. We've covered it separately in our guide to converting a PDF to Google Docs.