Make PDF on iPhone without Downloading Any App

Updated Dec 13,2018 | by Cody

Starting from iOS 10, an excellent feature to make PDF has been added to iOS device. If you are running iOS 10 or later version, you can make PDF on iPhone without a third-party app. You can convert literally everything to a PDF file on your iOS device.

You can easily convert any web pages, emails, photos to PDF on your iPhone. If you want to convert multiple items, you can also use Siri Shortcuts to automate the process. You can keep reading on to learn the detailed steps.

Are you familiar with the Print option in Share Sheet on your iOS device? Anything on your iPhone that can be printed can also be saved as a PDF file, so you can view it later on iBooks (Apple Books) or another PDF reader or markup app.

As you for web pages, you will see a Make PDF option in the Share Sheet. That’s very straightforward if you just want to convert a webpage to PDF. How about emails or photos to PDF? Follow the steps below to convert email to PDF.

Step 1. Find the email content or photos that you want to convert to PDF, and then tap the Share icon. This works with built-in Mail app and third-party mail app like Outlook.

Step 2. Select Print. For convert other content besides emails, select Print from Share Sheet.

Step 3. In the Printer Options screen, un-pinch and zoom in on each PDF page. Then you will see a new Share button at the right top corner.

Step 4. Tap the new Share icon to save the new PDF. You can save to Files, Copy to Books, Open in another app, etc.

You can also do this to photos to convert photos to PDF on your iPhone.

If you want to convert multiple items to PDF on your iPhone, then you can use an automation tool to do that for you. As you may know, Apple acquired Workflow, the best automation app for iOS, in 2017. In WWDC 2018, Apple officially released the Shortcuts app as the updated version of Workflow.

Shortcuts app has more 300 actions that you can use to automate the tasks you do regularly and Make PDF is one of them. For example, to convert a few web pages to PDF and save them to Files app. You can refer to the steps below to get it done.

Step 1. Get the Shortcuts app if you haven’t. If you are running iOS 11 or an older version, just get the other version of Shortcuts, Workflow. Then open this link in Safari to get this shortcut.

Step 2. Copy all the URLs of web pages that you want to convert to PDF.

Step 3. Open the Shortcuts app to run it. By default, converted PDFs will be saved in iCloud/Shortcuts folder. You can change that accordingly.

As you can see, you just need to input the URLs and you will get all the PDFs of the web pages that you want to save. This is just an example, you can modify this shortcut accordingly. You can also use it to convert PDFs to a long photo, so will get a long screenshot of a webpage.

Shortcuts is limitless. You can use it to do amazing things and make your iPhone more powerful. To get inspired, you can download pre-made Siri Shortcuts from Shortcuts Gallery or other websites.

Your iPhone and iPad can handle PDFs quite well, so you may prefer reading PDFs on your iOS device. If that’s your case, you can now transfer PDFs from PC to iPhone over Wi-Fi without a USB cable.

All you need is a Windows software IOTransfer, which is considered the best iPhone manager software for Windows. You can free download it to get started.

Once you get it installed, get to the AirTrans section from the top menu. Then you can use your iPhone to build connections to your iPhone. Of course, both devices must connect to the same network.

 Then you can drag files on your PC to transfer PDFs to iPhone wirelessly. Besides, IOTransfer can be very helpful to your iOS device. It can help you remove iPhone junk files, download online videos, make GIFs, etc. 

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