How to export knowledge base content from your Help Center as PDF (no coding required)
"Hi Patrick,
we really love your product, could you please send us a
printable user manual so we can have an in-depth look at it? Thanks!"
I was shocked when one of our biggest new customers asked me that question. We just moved to a 21st century solution for all our customer support and knowledge sharing activities (yay Zendesk <3) but struggled to deliver on this request in time.
We really love our customers and don't want that to happen again, so we decided to build a Zendesk app that makes exporting knowledge base content as a PDF a breeze. We hope you can benefit from it too! :) (If you do, please let us know! <3)
How does it work?
It only takes 5 minutes, here is how
1. Install the Knowledge Base to PDF Zendesk App
You can find the latest version of the app in the Zendesk app directory. Click install
1.1 Private Help Centers
In order to make the app work with a private help center it is required to configure the app's email (your agent's e-mail) and token field.
Here is how you can obtain a token: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/226022787-Generating-a-new-API-token-
If you already installed the app and want to configure the fields afterwards you can do that at Admin / Manage / Knowledge Base to PDF / Change settings
* The link above explains how to obtain an API token. Make sure to use your agent's e-mail, otherwise the token won't work
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After successfully installing the app you can access it by clicking on its icon in the left navigation bar:
2. Configure your PDF User Manual
Set a PDF front page title
This text will be shown on your first page, it should describe the document. e.g. [MyProductName] User Manual, etc
Optional: Select categories you want to export
Don't want to export your whole knowledge base? No problem!
This UI control enables you to filter the content that will be included in your PDF. Select any number of categories by clicking on their label, it will only include articles that are part of your selected categories.
3. Download it
A click on the "CREATE USER MANUAL" button will get you to the next step and the download will trigger automatically. Voila, that's it!
Note: This step can take from a few seconds to a minute depending on the size of your knowledge base.
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Other popular use cases
Product Knowledge Base Versioning
You just released a new version of your product that will require changes of your knowledge base articles, but you still have to support previous versions of your product.
No problem! Create a snapshot of your whole knowledge base as a PDF user manual before changing the articles for your new product and send it to customers requesting documentation about older versions
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Updates
2017-05-01: Added support for generating PDFs from private help center content
Contact
If you have questions, feedback, or love the app, please leave a comment or contact us directly: support@kolibridigital.com
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I'm always surprised when we get the PDF request too!
This sounds like a great app. Thanks for letting us know about it!
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It's not working on my Help Center... It simply exports an empty PDF.
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Hi Guilherme,
thanks for trying the app, I just had a look at our log files and it seems that your help center is set to restricted/private. The currently publicly available version of the app does not support exporting private content but we already submitted a new version that solves this issue and it should be live soon.
If you want to give it a try before it's through the Zendesk review queue, we'd be happy to send it over: support@kolibridigital.com
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That's good news. Thanks for responding, Patrick.
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Hello Patrick,
Thank you for your quick reply. I would love to test your new version. Thanks.
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Hi Patrick, this looks awesome. If you're after feature requests, it would be great for us if we could generate the PDFs for sections as well as whole categories :-)
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Good news everyone, the new version of the app (v1.1) just got published on the apps marketplace.
If you tried to export a PDF from your private help center and were disappointed because it didn't work this changes now because the new app supports exporting PDFs from private help centers :)
Here's the relevant part of the updated tutorial for private help centers:
1.1 Private Help Centers
In order to make the app work with a private help center it is required to configure the app's email (your agent's e-mail) and token field.
Here is how you can obtain a token: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/226022787-Generating-a-new-API-token-
If you already installed the app and want to configure the fields afterwards you can do that at Admin / Manage / Knowledge Base to PDF / Change settingsHappy PDF exporting!
Patrick
PS: Thanks to everyone who reached out to help make the app better
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Hi Chris, thanks for trying the app. Sure, I'm always up for some good feature requests ;-) Could you ping me at patrick@kolibridigital.com ? I might have some questions for you
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Hi Patrick, I just tried it but the output really looks more than weird. No properly page-breaks (at least after article or so), lot's of stuff and cryptical-links... all in all I don't believe I could hand this our to some of our customers, because of it's layout problems. If that could be improved, that would be great.... unless zendesk has some css-styles around, that I could you to tweak things a bit better....
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Hi Joerg,
thanks for trying the app. As you might have seen it is is still in an early stage and I'm collecting as much feedback as I can to make it better, so thank you for leaving a comment! :) Could you send me a few screenshots w/ examples of the problems you mentioned to patrick@kolibridigital.com ?
Right now the styles seem to work for *most* help centers, but it's not easy to generate good looking content for *all* help centers without knowing about the edge cases. So whenever you notice that your PDF doesn't look good please let me know so I can look into it and fix it
Thanks!
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In my opinion, it's mainly because of the following 5 reasons:
- Fontsizes and line-height of headlines do not look optimized for PDF printing (to low line-heights)
- Very different Font-Sizes even within one article (although the article viewed in the browser looks fine)
- Links being shown as native Zendesk-URL's e.g. related articles. This should be better similar to the generated index
- Related Search words are also shown as native URLs
- No underlines under links, because this makes it harder to read
So, all in all mainly optical reasons.
What could be also great is to have a setting, if a user want's to generate a hard-page-break after each article, so that it's easier to see, where a article ends and where the next starts.
To be able to make at least a clean/neat browser-print (at least for one article) I simply added the some PRINT CSS-styles into our zendesk helpcenter layout. So all unneccessary stuff is not being printed/shown on PDF and looks already very good now.
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Hi Patrick,
would it be an option to integrate some custom options or even to publish the code?
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Hi Jan, could you drop me a line at patrick@kolibridigital.com and elaborate a bit on the custom options? (ie what custom options? what's your usecase?) Thanks!
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Hi Patrick
Thanks for this App this is filling a gap as not all our customers can access our Help Center online ! this a great work !
For the next stage I fully agree on the improvements raised by Joerg and Chris :
- Ability to drill down Sections within a Category
- formatting of the output especially on the page breaks
other Nice-to-Have but less priority :
- Ability to insert a Logo on the Front page (or refer to the log stored in Zendesk support)
- Ability to insert a simple one line Header and Footer delimited by a border line
Thanks!
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Hi Patrick,
Thanks for putting this together! We'd like to give access to some elements of our Support site to potential clients, but the site is private so that gets a little tricky. This app would do the job perfectly.
I'm having a little trouble getting the export to work--when I configure the settings for the app, there's no option to Include all Pages and the Categories/Sections field doesn't populate with anything from my site.
I've generated the API token and input our Zendesk support email correctly, so not sure what the issue is. Are you still supporting this app? Do you have any suggestions for troubleshooting this issue?
Thanks!
-Sadie
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We have multiple brands set up for different regions, how can I configure this to pull the articles from each brand, it is currently only pulling articles from our default US brand help center need to pull articles from our other helpcenters
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We also have a need for handling multiple brands.
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Hey Phil and Dean!
Since this integration was built and is supported by a third-party developer, I'm afraid we won't be able to help much here in the Community. However, it looks like Patrick included a contact email address so you can reach out to him to find out if he can make an update to the integration!
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Hi Patrick,
We are very keen on getting a customized PDF output. We've emailed you directly several times and have yet to receive any response.
Please let us know the best way to reach you and move this forward.
Thanks!
Mohamed @ Telarix
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I, like Brett and Phil above need the ability to export my knowledge base by a specific brand.
Any advice? Please give me an answer.
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Phil, Brett, Cole:
this is currently not supported. There was a trick where you could set your default help center & default language to whichever knowledge base you wanted to export but this recently stopped working. We're working on a new app version that will let you do that properly, I will post here as soon as we have something usable
Mohamed: will get back to you today
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When I try to use this it does not load a list of my categories in Zendesk, it just spins on loading categories, has anyone else ran into this?
Jeff
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Welcome to the Community, Jeff!
Do you have a lot of content in your Help Center? Perhaps it's just taking some time to get everything compiled.
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I only have about 155 articles, so it's not a lot of content. I did end up getting it to pull in the categories using another web browser. I found another solution that allowed me to embed the "Print to PDF" button inside of the knowledge base in the help center though, that seemed to work more effectively.
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Jeff--
That is great info! I thought I tried everything to get this to work.
Can you share info about the other solution you used? Is it an app?
Thanks!
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Sadie,
I used Knowledge Print PDF Download Controls from the Marketplace. It generates a block of Code to place into your help center which adds a button to download the knowledge base document to a PDF or download the full section to PDF.
Hope that helps you!
Jeff
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Patrick,
I'm having two issues with the Knowledge Base to PDF app:
1. There is no way to select by brand. We have content separated into three brands and I want to be able to select a brand and then select from the categories in that brand.
2. When I generate a PDF, I'm not seeing any page numbers.
Regards,
Diane
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Hi Patrick,
Any progress on selecting which Brand's Knowledge base you're pulling from yet? Only thing I'd need to make this useable for me!
Thanks
John
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Hi Patrick,
This sounds pretty good app!! But when I tried, it does nothing. no pdf generation, no error, no message. Can you please tell what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks
Ashok
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Hi Patrick,
Is there a solution already on selecting which Brand the APP chooses to generate?
Best regards,
Ron
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