For certain industries and user-bases, it can make sense to include a link to a PDF version of a HTML web page — so that visitors can either view or download it.
From a recognizability and familiarity perspective, what should the link text say when leading to a PDF?
Brainstormed phrases and words to use
In my case, I would accompany it with a recognizable icon such as: 
A few text variations that I came up with:
But there are likely many more potentially good options.
Variations of those phrases
All of the above could work without "PDF", for example:
Also, they can feature a preposition or conjunction like "as" or "in", for example:
That can be extended with natural language, for example:
Given all the possibilities, what is the best practice considering user-behaviour or user-research?
Considering people on different devices
To find the "best" term, I think it is important to suit people:
- with different browser defaults (whether the file will be downloaded or opened in a new tab/window),
- on various devices (such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, e-readers, etc.),
- and using certain operating systems (e.g. Mac OS X arguably handles PDFs much better than Windows, which tends to crash PCs).
Without any tangible data to use to make a decision here — I am unsure how to proceed.
What do industry leaders do?
Have the practices of what "big players" and influencers (creators of various platforms for blogs, forums, frameworks, even operating systems, etc.) do when linking to PDFs been quantified or qualified?
It may also be worth including the file-size or file-name, but that is covered elsewhere.
Answer
My recommendation would be to go for Natural language options such as "Download this page as a pdf" as it gives a textual representation of what you would get when you download the pdf. You also need to realize that unless your ALT tag is well defined for the pdf image, having a textual description along with the image would be helpful for screen readers . To quote article on increasing usability for screen readers
Descriptive link text
Screen reader users can browse through web pages by calling up a list of on-page links, and activating the link in which they're most interested. As such, non-descriptive link text such as ‘click here’ should be avoided at all costs as it makes no sense whatsoever out of context.
The good news is that the use of descriptive link texts represents a usability benefit for everyone. When we scan through web pages, one of the items that stands out to us is link text. ‘Click here’ is totally meaningless to web users scanning through pages and forces users to hunt through surrounding text to discover the link destination.
Do note that some browsers render the pdf in the page itself and might not download it and you would have to update your htaccess file to ensure the file is downloaded by the browser. So choose your wordings wisely depending upon what browsers are being used by your user base and also ensure your htaccess is updated accordingly.
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