Useful notes for developers working with PDF generation, document conversion, and infrastructure decisions.
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&...
Continue readingIntro 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 ...
Continue readingIntro 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 packa...
Continue readingVideo 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 “ContentNotF...
Continue readingIntro .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...
Continue readingIntro 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 ...
Continue readingIntro 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 ar...
Continue readingIntro The following HTML template is excellent if you have a need to print any of the following items to PDF. Generic application form Job application form Contest submission form Award submission nomination form Grant application for...
Continue readingDevelopers 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...
Continue readingIntroductionGenerating a map is hard enough. Google has recently clamped down on their APIs which has left developers scrambling for open source solutions. In today’s article we will take a look at how to embe...
Continue readingIntroduction If you are on this article, you already know what a watermark is, but just to be sure, it is a way of adding an image to a document to show where it was generated from or to avoid tampering for some reason. A common us...
Continue readingIntro CKEditor4 is a battle tested and widely used WYSIWYG html editor. In this post we will discuss how to use our open source plugin for saving the document to PDF. Example Code + Demo Feel free to check out our github page...
Continue readingIt is rare, but there may be some situations where the only option you have to convert HTML to PDF or a URL to PDF is from the client-side javascript. Now there are some existing options such as jsPDF, but they are severely limited. An i...
Continue readingIntro Here at Api2Pdf, we are proud to announce a new client library for nodejs! Our node library makes it easy to convert HTML to PDF, URL to PDF, Word to PDF, and Merge PDFs together. We support a number of endpoints such as wkhtm...
Continue readingIntro I can only imagine you reading this if you are an attorney or work for an attorney in some capacity. Perhaps you are a programmer and have been tasked with converting thousands of emails to PDF format. If so, you have come to the r...
Continue readingIntro 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 the...
Continue readingIntro Adding a header, footer, and page numbers to your PDFs with wkhtmltopdf is rather straight forward. We provide a list of advanced options here. Wkhtmltopdf is a popular open source PDF rendering engine. The techniques describe...
Continue readingIntro Surprisingly, if you are using Headless Chrome to generate PDFs, you may find that getting header html, footer html, and page numbers to appear is not completely obvious. There are two reasons for this: 1. You have set a flag to ge...
Continue readingIntro It is quite common, when tasked with generating a PDF report, or PDF book of some kind that you are required to break up the PDF into separate pages, or items. Typically an item will span multiple pages, and you want the next item ...
Continue readingIntro TinyMCE is a battle tested and widely used WYSIWYG html editor. In this post we will discuss how to use our open source plugin for saving the document to PDF. Example Code + Demo Feel free to check out our github page&nbs...
Continue readingOur 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 cheape...
Continue readingTen years ago, there were very few options to converting HTML to PDF. At the time, we were talking about a handful of PDF rendering engines such as ABCPDF, TCPDF, and iTextSharp. iText reigned supreme over the .NET and Java world. It pro...
Continue readingIntro Software developers often have to deal with the real world in the form of shipping products. This is quite common with online shopping sites. Everyone is familiar with a packing slip that is included in the box they receive along w...
Continue readingIntro We previously made a post on how to export a HighChart graph to PDF using the wkhtmltopdf endpoint. This time we are going to cover AnyChart, which is arguably better than HighCarts in many areas. In this post we are...
Continue readingMany Api2Pdf customers generate PDFs for the purposes of generating packing slips, invoices, receipts, product labels, the list goes on and on. It only makes sense for us to make it even more convenient for you to generate barcodes and Q...
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