Archive for the ‘Research’ Category


[Solved] Access denied | v2018.api2pdf.com used Cloudflare to restrict access

January 23rd, 2019 / by api2pdf /

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 Cloudflare to restrict access. The owner of this website (v2018.api2pdf.com) […]

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Best free PrinceXML alternative – Headless Chrome

December 27th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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ReportLab Alternative for PDF generation in Python

December 12th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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[Solved] Issue rendering UTF-8 or Unicode characters in HTML and PDFs

December 11th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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: […]

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Using custom fonts with wkhtmltopdf and Headless Chrome

November 12th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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Debugging Amazon S3, Lambda, Timeouts, ContentOperationNotPermitted, wkhtmltopdf, and Headless Chrome

November 1st, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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[Solved] Could not install package ‘Api2Pdf 1.0.1’. Project that targets ‘.NETFramework,Version=v4.5.1’

October 26th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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[Solved] ContentNotFoundError wkhtmltopdf exited with code 1

October 26th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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Solution for overlapping content when generating PDFs with table headers and footers

September 10th, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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TCPDF Alternative for PHP

August 22nd, 2018 / by api2pdf /

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 […]

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