Blog
[Solved] Access denied | v2018.api2pdf.com used Cloudflare to restrict access
This post is for individuals who are trying to connect to API2PDF via code. Depending on how you are connecting to API2PDF, or any service that is behind Cloudflare really, you might find that you are getting an error like so: Access denied | v2018.api2pdf.com used Cloudfla...
Continue readingActivePDF Alternative for PDF Generation
Intro ActivePDF is a popular PDF manipulation product for .NET developers. They offer a suite of products, which among them, allow you to manipulate / edit existing PDFs, generate new PDFs, convert HTML to PDFs, extract data out of existing PDFs, compression, and converting PD...
Continue readingAspose Alternative to PDF Generation
Intro Aspose PDF is a popular product for PDF creation and manipulation. Among the features it boasts include extracting text from PDFs, modifying the content of PDFs, and converting PDFs to any number of file formats. Add or remove watermarks, populate form field data, add he...
Continue readingCrystal Reports Alternative for PDF generation
Intro Crystal Reports is a product offered by SAP. The positives of this product is that it allows you, likely a small business, to connect to an existing data source, and then design how you want your output report to look like. It can export your design to PDF or over a doze...
Continue readingApi2Pdf releases java client library to convert HTML to PDF and more!
Intro Since we released Api2Pdf, we have received many requests for a java client library. It’s been on our to-do list, but we just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We have previous released libraries and SDKs for PHP, Python, C#, and node. You can now convert HTM...
Continue readingBest free PrinceXML alternative – Headless Chrome
Intro PrinceXML is a popular library for converting HTML to PDF. It is often touted as the “best” HTML to PDF conversion tool currently on the market. However, it comes with an unbelievably hefty price tag of $3800 for installation on a single server. This is ...
Continue readingConvert HTML to PDF with Javascript and React
Intro In a previous post, we provided guidance with how to generate PDFs from HTML and web pages with javascript and jquery. In this post, we provide a sample React component to convert HTML to PDFs using Headless Chrome or wkhtmltopdf. Api2Pdf is an HTML to PDF API tha...
Continue readingReportLab Alternative for PDF generation in Python
Intro Click here to start generating PDFs in Python now! Get going in just a few minutes! ReportLab has been around for a very long time and is one of the more popular options for generating PDFs in the Python programming language. According to its website, it receives ...
Continue reading[Solved] Issue rendering UTF-8 or Unicode characters in HTML and PDFs
Intro Api2Pdf is popular all over the world and therefore we have customers who need to generate PDFs in many different languages. One problem that has come up recently is that a customer needed to render characters from their native language: Dutch. Dutch has some special cha...
Continue readingOptimizing Azure Functions to avoid the 300 connection limit
Intro Api2Pdf is a web service for generating PDFs from HTML, URLs, and Offices files. In order to scale to millions of requests, our backend runs on a serverless architecture. Our infrastructure is comprised of three main components: Web App, located at portal.api2pdf...
Continue readingHTML to PDF with Python and wkhtmltopdf or Headless Chrome
Intro In this article we will cover converting HTML to PDF format with Python with just a few lines of code and the Api2Pdf API. Api2Pdf is an HTML to PDF API built on AWS Lambda that allows you to produce PDFs at massive scale. Api2Pdf offers both wkhtmltopdf and ...
Continue readingMerge PDFs together with C# and .NET Core
Intro In this article we are going to cover how to merge PDFs together with C# and .NET Core with just a few lines of code using the Api2Pdf dotnet client library. Api2Pdf is a REST API that makes it super easy to generate and combine PDFs. You can view the full documentation ...
Continue readingConvert powerpoint to PDF with Python and LibreOffice
Intro In this article we are going to demonstrate how easy it is to convert a powerpoint file (ppt, pptx) to a PDF file using Python and the Api2Pdf LibreOffice API endpoint. Api2Pdf is a REST API that makes it easy to generate PDF files from HTML, URLs, and Microsof...
Continue readingSave a Web Page as PDF – WordPress Plugin
Save to Pdf Intro Api2Pdf proudly announces the release of a brand new WordPress Plugin – Save Page to PDF. The purpose of the plugin is to make it easy to add a “Print to PDF” button on any page or article of your WordPress site. If you click the b...
Continue readingUsing custom fonts with wkhtmltopdf and Headless Chrome
Intro Using custom fonts with wkhtmltopdf or Headless Chrome is pretty straight forward, but there are a few caveats. First, it is important to know what fonts Api2Pdf supports out of the box with both endpoints. By default, if you do nothing but go to the home pag...
Continue readingThe journey of migrating PDF generation to a serverless architecture
Api2Pdf is a REST API that helps application developers generate PDFs at massive scale. It was co-founded by myself, Zack Schwartz, and my partner Kunal Johar. The two of us also run another company called OpenWater. OpenWater’s customers live and die by PDFs. ...
Continue readingDebugging Amazon S3, Lambda, Timeouts, ContentOperationNotPermitted, wkhtmltopdf, and Headless Chrome
Intro You ever run into a bug that is so perplexing you don’t even know where to begin? I’d like to share a story that happened this week. As you may know, Api2Pdf runs on AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is Amazon’s serverless compute service that lets you...
Continue reading[Solved] ContentNotFoundError wkhtmltopdf exited with code 1
Video Instruction of Problem Video Player 00:00 02:21 Intro If you are using wkhtmltopdf, an open source HTML to PDF library, you might find that sometimes you receive a “ContentNotFound wkhtmltopdf exited with code 1&rdqu...
Continue reading[Solved] Could not install package ‘Api2Pdf 1.0.1’. Project that targets ‘.NETFramework,Version=v4.5.1’
Intro You may get this error if you are trying to install a package via NuGet into your .NET application. The full error reads something like: Could not install package ‘Api2Pdf 1.0.1’. You are trying to install this package into a project that targets ‘.N...
Continue readingConvert HTML to PDF with C# and .NET Core
Intro .NET Core (dotnetcore) is all the rage now and it truly is the future of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. It is cross-platform, lightweight, and wicked fast. Api2Pdf’s web portal is built on .NET Core. So we love it. However, libraries that work with P...
Continue readingFPDF Alternative for PHP for Generating PDFs
Intro FPDF is an open source library to generate PDFs in PHP. There are some key advantages to this. No external dependencies — can generate basic PDFs straight from PHP code. Free This might be okay for some, but there are issues with FPDF. With a pure PHP impl...
Continue readingMerge PDFs together with Python on AWS Lambda
Intro Api2Pdf is a REST API that allows you to generate PDFs at massive scale. Among the functions that Api2Pdf provides, merging PDFs together is one of the more popular capabilities. It is quite simple to do in Python, and this article will show you how. Merge PDF API...
Continue readingFree Bootstrap 4 HTML Template for Displaying Database Records to PDF
Intro The following HTML template is excellent if you have a need to print any of the following items to PDF. Generic application form Job application form Contest submission form Award submission nomination form Grant application form Scholarship application form Any kind ...
Continue readingSolution for overlapping content when generating PDFs with table headers and footers
Developers often run into an issue when converting HTML to PDF that contains tables. The issue is that if the content runs onto the next page, the table headers (<thead>) and footers (<tfoot>) are repeating and overlapping on each other when they shouldn’t be...
Continue readingAdding a Watermark with WKHTMLTOPDF
Introduction If you are on this article, you already know what a watermark is, but just to be sure, it is a way of adding an image to a document to show where it was generated from or to avoid tampering for some reason. A common use of watermarking is to add the word&nbs...
Continue reading