Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
Best 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 game over for most companies. Free Alternative to PrinceXML […]
Read MoreReportLab 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 50,000 downloads per month and is included […]
Read More[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 characters that require unicode or UTF-8. For example, these: […]
Read MoreUsing 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 page of Api2Pdf and print the below HTML […]
Read MoreDebugging 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 scale to countless requests very easily. Our two most […]
Read More[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 ‘.NETFramework,Version=v4.5.1’, but the package does not contain any assembly references or […]
Read More[Solved] ContentNotFoundError wkhtmltopdf exited with code 1
Video Instruction of Problem 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” error. The error is common and can be easily solved. We see it happen frequently with Api2Pdf customers and so we wanted to write […]
Read MoreSolution 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. This happens on both wkhtmltopdf and Headless Chrome. In fact, it […]
Read MoreTCPDF Alternative for PHP
Intro TCPDF is an open source library to convert HTML to PDF 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 TCPDF. With a pure PHP implementation, you run into serious […]
Read MoreWKHTMLTOPDF vs Headless Chrome – PDF Size Comparison
Our mission at API2PDF is to help developers use AWS Lambda to generate PDFs from HTML as cheaply and quickly as possible. Our two most popular rendering engines are WKHTMLTOPDF and Headless Chrome. Goal: Find out when it is cheaper to use WKHTMLTOPDF vs Headless Chrome. Testing Methodology In our analysis today we are going […]
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