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LibreOffice functionality added to v2 public beta
Hello everyone! We are proud to announce that LibreOffice has been added to our v2 public beta. Documentation is available here. There is new functionality that is coming with this release. We have four endpoints that you can use: /libreoffice/any-to-pdf – S...
Continue readingApi2Pdf launches v2 in beta!
Welcome everybody, this is a follow up to our post six months ago. We are very excited to give you an update and to announce the launch of version 2 of API2PDF, now in early access beta. The documentation is available here. Version 2 currently only has our Headless C...
Continue readingDocker Container for Headless Chrome and Puppeteer
Intro API2PDF is proud to announce it has built a Docker Container to provide a convenient and reliable Web API to convert web pages and HTML to PDF format and screenshots. The underlying rendering engine is Headless Chrome w/ Puppeteer functionality. Testing can be done to ...
Continue readingCelebrating one year and tentative roadmap for the future of the API2PDF product
The Past Year Hello everyone, Zack here! One year ago we hit the metaphorical GO button. It was anti-climactic of course because we had no launch strategy and Google had yet to even index our website. It was about 10 days later where I remember waking up one morning and foun...
Continue readingConvert HTML to PDF with javascript and AngularJS
Intro In some cases you may need to convert HTML to PDF from your client side application. Rendering a high quality PDF is not obvious and doing it purely from javascript isn’t feasible either. You need to be able to use a browser-based PDF engine like wkhtmltopdf or H...
Continue readingPost Mortem – Ensuring High Availability on Azure Functions
Intro On May 15th, 2019 at 5:01 PM UTC, API2PDF services stopped generating PDF files, returning high error rates. This is what is depicted in the image above. 3 minutes later, at 5:04 PM, services resumed. While only down for 3 minutes and 99% of our customers did not even ...
Continue readingConvert HTML to PDF with javascript and VueJs
Intro VueJs is a popular client side javascript framework. It has risen in prominence as an alternative to juggernauts like ReactJs and Angular. Part of its allure comes from its simplicity and lower barrier to entry. While building a VueJs application, you may find yourself...
Continue readingTackling API2PDF’s technical and business challenges with Azure Table Storage and Data Lake Analytics
Intro Every now and then I like to post about API2PDF’s infrastructure and business side. It can be slightly more interesting than talking about PDF files. In today’s post we will combine the two by discussing our long term logging components and how we...
Continue reading[Solved] Bootstrap striped table not printing to PDF
We received a support request from a developer who was using Bootstrap’s CSS and his HTML table was set to “striped” via: <table class=”table table-striped”> …</table> Now the HTML was correct, and when loading it up in a br...
Continue reading[Solved] Troubleshooting rendering issues with HTML to PDF
In this article we will walk you through the best way to figure out why your HTML is not properly rendering as PDF using our API service. Step 1 Open up your favorite text editor like notepad++ or VS Code and save your raw HTML that you’ve been sending to API2PDF and sav...
Continue reading[Resolved] Bad kerning with wkhtmltopdf rendering of html
Today we received an inquiry about wkhtmltopdf’s poor rendering of HTML to PDF with Google’s Roboto font. Roboto is one of the most popular fonts and so it’s important for this to be resolved. The issue with this rendering problem is known as “kerning...
Continue readingMulti-lingual support for HTML to PDF (wkhtmltopdf / Headless Chrome)
Intro – HTML to PDF with Multiple Languages A frequent question we receive at API2PDF is if it is possible to generate PDFs with foreign languages, or languages that contain special characters in their text. The answer is yes, and it is possible to support these language...
Continue readingdomPDF Alternative for PHP
Intro domPDF is an HTML to PDF Converter. At its heart, dompdf is (mostly) a CSS 2.1 compliant HTML layout and rendering engine written in PHP. It is a style-driven renderer: it will download and read external stylesheets, inline style tags, and the style att...
Continue readingWeb service to convert HTML + CSS to PDF
Intro API2PDF is a web service for generating PDFs at massive scale. Our mission is to make the experience of generating PDFs for application developers not completely miserable. Our system is designed with extreme scalability in mind and is ready for enterprise use. We a...
Continue readingGenerate Barcodes and QR codes with Javascript and jQuery (ZXING)
One of the best ways to generate barcodes and QR codes is to use the open source library Zebra Crossing, aka ZXING. It’s available in multiple programming languages, but you can only reliably generate these codes on the server-side. If you are reading this blog post, it ...
Continue readingjsPDF Alternative for PDF Generation
jsPDF is a client side library for javascript that allows you generate PDFs. It is open source and convenient for quick and dirty PDF generation, but unfortunately it lacks some key functionality. Since it is not browser-based, building a PDF with jsPDF can be cumbersome....
Continue readingRender Google Map to PDF with Headless Chrome
If you are reading this article, you are likely having issue getting a Google Map to render properly when printing to PDF with Headless Chrome. The problem stems from Headless Chrome printing the page to PDF too fast — prior to Google Maps being able to display their map...
Continue readingIronPDF Alternative for PDF Generation in C# and .NET
IronPDF is a C# library for converting HTML to PDF, URLs to PDF, and images to PDFs. Additionally, it supports extracting data and images from existing PDF files. And finally, you can merge, split, and manipulate PDFs as well. It’s built exclusively for C# and .NET devel...
Continue readingGenerate PDF with Python Flask or Django
If you are building a web application in Python with either of the two most popular frameworks – Flask or Django, there’s a good chance you will need to support functionality for PDF generation. Convert HTML to PDF with Flask or Django To generate PDFs, we are goin...
Continue reading[Solved] Error – Couldn’t connect to server localhost
Fixing the Issue localhost is your development machine. If you send a url to a PDF to API2PDF that is localhost, there is nothing API2PDF can do. Localhost is your own machine, and API2PDF lives in the cloud on AWS Lambda, so it has no access to your file. That is why whe...
Continue reading[Solved] Headless Chrome options ignoring landscape mode when printing to pdf
We ran into a tough debugging issue this morning when a customer wrote in saying that our .NET client library was not generating his PDFs in ‘landscape’ mode while using Headless Chrome. The customer provided all of their C# code and I went to work trying to figure...
Continue readingGenerate PDFs from Salesforce Apex
We released the full code and documentation on GitHub. See full details on how to generate PDFs using Salesforce. Many developers moving to Salesforce are used to the power of .NET or Java and have their favorite way of generating PDFs from HTML. Api2Pdf ...
Continue reading[Solved] Accessing a secure page with a URL endpoint
We sometimes receive support requests asking how API2PDF can access a secure a page on your website when using the wkhtmltopdf/url or chrome/url endpoints as shown below. A secure page means that it is behind some kind of login wall. When using a URL to PDF endpoint, API2PD...
Continue readingAPI2PDF and HIPAA Compliance for PDF Generation
Intro HIPAA is a US law that governs data privacy and security of confidential medical patient records. Breach of HIPAA could yield immense fines and punishment. It is of utmost seriousness and organizations go to great lengths to ensure they are HIPAA compliant. We recognize ...
Continue readingApi2Pdf Feature Announcement: Delete PDFs on Command!
Until now, API2PDF only stored your PDF for 24 hours and then the PDF will delete itself. This is great for most customers. However, by far, our most requested feature is the ability to delete the PDF right away. This is important for customers who have very high security need...
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