Archive for the ‘Research’ Category


Background color on header / footer in Headless Chrome

July 26th, 2023 / by api2pdf /

Intro If you are generating PDF files from URLs or HTML with Headless Chrome and are trying to have a background color in the header or footer template of the resulting PDF file, you might be running into issues. This is even the case when you are using puppeteer on top of headless chrome. The […]

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[resolved] 403 Forbidden error message in logs

June 8th, 2022 / by api2pdf /

If you are seeing a 403 Forbidden error code in your logs when trying to make API calls with the any-to-pdf, merge pdf, password, bookmarks, extract-pages endpoints, this article will point you in the right direction. When you make one of these API calls by passing in a URL to a location of a file, […]

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[Resolved] PdfSharp – invalid entry in XRef table

October 10th, 2021 / by api2pdf /

Intro If you found us through Google, welcome! Api2Pdf is a REST API that helps developers generate and interact with PDF files. Among our most popular endpoints is merging or combining PDFs together. To support the merging of PDF files, behind the scenes, our API uses the MIT-licensed PdfSharpCore library. You may be using this […]

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[Resolved] Issue downloading PDF with Java

April 8th, 2020 / by api2pdf /

We’re not java experts here, but we have gotten some reports from customers who run into issues after generating the PDF file – they want to download that file and save it locally. Never faced any issues with python or c#, but Java seems to have some problems. The below code is example of how […]

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[Resolved] PDF is rendering blank or only partially with Headless Chrome

April 8th, 2020 / by api2pdf /

Intro In this post we will outline why in some cases PDFs are rendering blank or maybe only some elements, or part of elements are appearing but not everything on the page. We are going to explain why this occurs when rendering PDFs with Headless Chrome, but it would impact any browser based engine. Common […]

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Celebrating one year and tentative roadmap for the future of the API2PDF product

June 24th, 2019 / by api2pdf /

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 found that a developer from […]

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Post Mortem – Ensuring High Availability on Azure Functions

June 13th, 2019 / by api2pdf /

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 notice, at least one customer […]

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Tackling API2PDF’s technical and business challenges with Azure Table Storage and Data Lake Analytics

May 11th, 2019 / by api2pdf /

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 use that to track growth metrics and accounting for finance purposes. […]

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[Solved] Bootstrap striped table not printing to PDF

April 13th, 2019 / by api2pdf /

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 browser, the striped rows, which alternate a background color to make it easier for reading was appearing […]

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[Solved] Troubleshooting rendering issues with HTML to PDF

April 10th, 2019 / by api2pdf /

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 save it as […]

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