Blog

LibreOffice functionality added to v2 public beta

Published Feb 08 2020

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...

Api2Pdf launches v2 in beta!

Published Jan 11 2020

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...

Docker Container for Headless Chrome and Puppeteer

Published Aug 03 2019

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 ...

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

Published Jun 24 2019

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...

Convert HTML to PDF with javascript and AngularJS

Published Jun 13 2019

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...

Post Mortem – Ensuring High Availability on Azure Functions

Published Jun 13 2019

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 ...

Convert HTML to PDF with javascript and VueJs

Published Jun 12 2019

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...

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

Published May 11 2019

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...

[Solved] Bootstrap striped table not printing to PDF

Published Apr 13 2019

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...

[Solved] Troubleshooting rendering issues with HTML to PDF

Published Apr 10 2019

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...

[Resolved] Bad kerning with wkhtmltopdf rendering of html

Published Apr 04 2019

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...

Multi-lingual support for HTML to PDF (wkhtmltopdf / Headless Chrome)

Published Mar 25 2019

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...

domPDF Alternative for PHP

Published Mar 23 2019

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...

Web service to convert HTML + CSS to PDF

Published Mar 23 2019

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...

Generate Barcodes and QR codes with Javascript and jQuery (ZXING)

Published Mar 20 2019

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 ...

jsPDF Alternative for PDF Generation

Published Mar 14 2019

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....

Render Google Map to PDF with Headless Chrome

Published Mar 03 2019

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...

IronPDF Alternative for PDF Generation in C# and .NET

Published Feb 19 2019

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...

Generate PDF with Python Flask or Django

Published Feb 17 2019

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...

[Solved] Error – Couldn’t connect to server localhost

Published Feb 12 2019

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...

[Solved] Headless Chrome options ignoring landscape mode when printing to pdf

Published Feb 09 2019

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...

Generate PDFs from Salesforce Apex

Published Feb 05 2019

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 ...

[Solved] Accessing a secure page with a URL endpoint

Published Feb 04 2019

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...

API2PDF and HIPAA Compliance for PDF Generation

Published Jan 31 2019

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 ...

Api2Pdf Feature Announcement: Delete PDFs on Command!

Published Jan 26 2019

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...