Notes is where a lot of paperwork quietly lives: a packing list, the details for a rental application, a recipe someone asked for, a scanned prescription. Sooner or later someone wants it as a PDF. Notes can do that itself, with a button Apple put somewhere you'd never look.

How do I save a note as a PDF on iPhone?

Open the note, tap Share, tap Markup, then tap Done. Notes turns the note into a PDF and saves it. Step by step:

  1. Open the Notes app and the note you want.
  2. Tap the Share button (the square with the arrow) at the top.
  3. Tap Markup. If it isn't in the list, tap View More first.
  4. You're now looking at the note as a PDF. Draw, highlight or sign on it if you need to, or leave it as it is.
  5. Tap Done to save the PDF, and choose a folder in Files if your iPhone asks where.

The PDF uses the note's current view: if a photo or attachment in the note is shown small, it's small in the PDF too. Make it bigger in the note before exporting if it matters.

The other way: print the note to a PDF

If Markup doesn't do what you want, the print trick works on notes too:

  1. In the note, tap Share, then Print (under View More if needed).
  2. On the print preview, tap the Share button.
  3. Choose Save to Files, or send it straight from there with Mail or Messages.

Both give you a regular PDF. Markup is quicker and lets you annotate; Print lets you send it without saving a copy first. The same trick turns almost anything else into a PDF, from emails to webpages; there's a whole guide on making a PDF on iPhone.

Getting a scanned document out of Notes

This is where people get caught. Scans you made with the Notes scanner (and PDFs you dropped into a note) are already PDFs. But if you export the note with Share → Markup, Apple's own guide says the result includes only the first page of any multi-page scan or PDF inside it. Your four-page lease becomes a one-page PDF and nobody notices until the landlord does.

To get the whole scan out, share the scan itself, not the note:

  1. Open the note with the scan.
  2. Tap the scan's menu button (or touch and hold the scan).
  3. Choose Share, then Save to Files, Mail, or wherever it's going.

The scan goes out as a multi-page PDF, every page intact. The same menu has Rename, which saves you from a folder full of files called "Scanned Document." If the scan came out crooked or dark, how to scan documents on iPhone has the fixes, and Notes lets you rotate or crop a page from the scan's thumbnail More menu before you share it.

Putting a PDF into a note

The reverse job is just as easy, and handy when you want a PDF next to your own notes about it:

  1. In Files or Mail, touch and hold the PDF.
  2. Tap Share, then Notes.
  3. Choose the note and tap Save.

Inside the note you can change how big the PDF preview is (View As in its menu), mark it up with the handwriting tools, and rotate pages. Photos of documents work too, though a scan is cleaner; if you only have a photo, here's how to convert a photo to PDF on iPhone.

Common problems

I don't see Markup or Print in the share sheet. Scroll to the bottom of the share sheet and tap View More. Both are there.

The note is locked. Unlock it with Face ID or your notes password, then export. The PDF you save isn't locked, so treat it like any copy of private information.

Checklists and links look different. In a PDF, a checklist is just a picture of checkboxes, and links to other notes don't work. That's normal: a PDF is a snapshot of the note, not a copy of it.

The PDF is too big to attach. Big photos inside the note make big PDFs. Shrink it with the compress PDF tool, which runs in your browser and doesn't upload the file.

I wanted text, not a PDF. On current iOS, the Share button also offers Export as Markdown, which gives you the note's text as a plain file. Or tap Open in Pages to keep working on it as a document.

Notes is a notebook, not a filing cabinet

Notes is great at holding the thing you're working on today. It's less good at the scans you'll need in three years: the warranty, the signed contract, the vaccination record. They pile up in a long list of notes named after their first line, and you find them again by scrolling. We wrote a fair comparison of the two approaches in Paperlock vs Apple Notes scanning.

Paperlock is the filing cabinet. Save a scan or a PDF into it and it reads the document, gives it a clear title, notes the dates that matter, such as when something expires, and keeps it behind Face ID. Later you ask a question in plain English instead of scrolling. And any document in the vault exports as a PDF whenever someone asks.