Blog

[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...

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

Published Jan 23 2019

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...

ActivePDF Alternative for PDF Generation

Published Jan 19 2019

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...

Aspose Alternative to PDF Generation

Published Jan 19 2019

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...

Crystal Reports Alternative for PDF generation

Published Jan 19 2019

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...

Api2Pdf releases java client library to convert HTML to PDF and more!

Published Jan 09 2019

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...

Best free PrinceXML alternative – Headless Chrome

Published Dec 27 2018

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 ...

Convert HTML to PDF with Javascript and React

Published Dec 19 2018

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...

ReportLab Alternative for PDF generation in Python

Published Dec 12 2018

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 ...

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

Published Dec 11 2018

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...

Optimizing Azure Functions to avoid the 300 connection limit

Published Dec 02 2018

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...

HTML to PDF with Python and wkhtmltopdf or Headless Chrome

Published Nov 22 2018

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 ...

Merge PDFs together with C# and .NET Core

Published Nov 18 2018

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 ...

Convert powerpoint to PDF with Python and LibreOffice

Published Nov 17 2018

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...

Save a Web Page as PDF – WordPress Plugin

Published Nov 12 2018

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...

Using custom fonts with wkhtmltopdf and Headless Chrome

Published Nov 12 2018

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...

The journey of migrating PDF generation to a serverless architecture

Published Nov 06 2018

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. ...

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

Published Nov 01 2018

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...

[Solved] ContentNotFoundError wkhtmltopdf exited with code 1

Published Oct 26 2018

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...

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

Published Oct 26 2018

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...

Convert HTML to PDF with C# and .NET Core

Published Oct 18 2018

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...

FPDF Alternative for PHP for Generating PDFs

Published Oct 10 2018

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...

Merge PDFs together with Python on AWS Lambda

Published Oct 10 2018

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...