The existing documentation is a little unclear on this, because it says you need to add PDF_GENERATOR=True to your pelicanconf.py file.

This advice is out of date: PDF generation has been moved to a plugin.

So you need to first make sure you have rst2pdf installed:

$ sudo apt-get install rst2pdf

and then add the following to pelicanconf.py

PLUGIN_PATH = '../pelican-plugins'  # or wherever.
PLUGINS = ['pdf']

However, doing this seems to screw up the pygments highlighting on my regular html output. This is because deep in the rst2pdf code, in a file called pygments2style.py , all the pygment elements have their CSS classes prepended with pygment- . I haven't figured out how to generate HTML and PDF nicely at the same time.