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What is a good web API to convert web pages to PDF?

  • I'm trying to automate a workflow to archive web content to PDF files on the cloud. Here are some of the options I found and are mentioned by other users: PDFmyURL - http://pdfmyurl.com/html-to-pdf-api Seems to have a lot of options and supports POST and GET requests. Does not seem to have a free plan other than for special institutions (non-profit etc.) HTM2PDF - http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/html-to-pdf-api Supports GET and POST requests - works with a credit system, has servers in different continents JolliPrint - shut down in 2014 ConvertAPI (http://www.convertapi.com/web-pdf-api) but it seems to have stopped working (at least the free version), gives blank output. pdfcrowd http://pdfcrowd.com/html-to-pdf-api,  but there are a few snags: the REST API requires POST requests, which  rules out ifttt integration (*), and also it offers only 100 credits  total for a free account. Is there anything else which offers i) free access without a hard limit (reasonable monthly caps are fine), ii) output of reasonable quality for personal archival purposes, and preferably iii) responds to GET requests in the form of plain ol' URL strings? Thanks. (*) Now that Zapier's free plan is somewhat usable, I could use their webhook to call the API. However, Zapier does not yet have API integration with services I use like Google Reader and Pocket, which ifttt does. Reader can provide public feeds so that's not an issue, Pocket however provides very limited feeds, which means that I'll have to hack a Pocket->ifttt->text file on Dropbox->Yahoo! Pipes->RSS feed->Zapier->webhook->Dropbox workflow, and at this point I'm wondering if it'll be less effort to just write the code myself and host it on a free PaaS plan like CloudFoundry o_O

  • Answer:

    There are a bunch of options* for converting a web page to a PDF. A number have already been mentioned in the question and other answers. One thing to consider is that, since a number of these have come and gone, it might make sense to pay for a service you use in hopes that it will be more likely to continue providing the service. That said, PDFMyURL seems to work well: http://pdfmyurl.com/support/index.jsp#API It's incredibly simple, yet has a number of options. *ProgrammableWeb, where I work, lists about 20 in its directory: http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/pdf/1?sort=date

Adam DuVander at Quora Visit the source

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Recently I was facing the same issue and solved it something like described above, as the by-then available services featuring PDF conversion was too expensive versus the cost to integrate. Here are the tools we used: Wkhtmltopdf for the actual conversion process - should run directly on a somewhat new Ubuntu server installation. It understands most of modern HTML+CSS quite well. Node.js for invoking the actual conversation process and uploading the created files to Amazon S3. The whole script should be far less than 100 LOC. I think that there is a working example of node.js + wkhtmltopdf online. Finally, Zeromq or rabbitmq to act as middleman between your current application and node.js to make it super easy to integrate things and keep track of your conversation jobs with needed durability, regardless of what programming language your app is built with.

Joakim Br

You might also consider using the Saaspose PDF API (http://saaspose.com/). It has low free limits for developers but I do not believe it will support requirement #3 (simple GET request to convert).

Dave Goldberg

You might want to check out the following API providers PDFmyURL and HTM2PDF, which both offer a very complete API to convert web pages to PDF including full CSS2 and JavaScript, but also many layout options and options to apply a watermark or password to the resulting PDF. http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk - has a HTML to PDF API as well as a full blown SDK that saves you a lot of programming http://pdfmyurl.com/html-to-pdf-api -PDFmyURL offers a very extensive web to PDF API with a lot of options. Their pricing is also very transparent as opposed to many other providers. They charge in number of PDFs/month instead of credits that nobody understands.

Retze Faber

Try http://selectpdf.com/html-to-pdf-api/ from SelectPdf. SelectPdf HTML To PDF Online REST API is a professional solution that lets you create PDF from web pages and raw HTML code in your applications. The API is easy to use and the integration takes only a few lines of code. SelectPdf HTML To PDF API can be used from any programming language. Here are some samples for http://selectpdf.com/web-html-to-pdf-rest-api-for-java-samples/ and http://selectpdf.com/web-html-to-pdf-rest-api-for-php-samples/.

Tom Williams

Peardoc (http://www.peardoc.com) offers web API for HTML to PDF conversion.

T E Gautham

use nodeJS on a server using the phantom bindings:1 - npm install phantom2 - open a file called webtopng.js with:var phantom = require('phantom');if (process.argv.length !== 4) {console.log('Usage: webtopdf.js <some URL> <output>');process.exit();}var address = process.argv[2];var output = process.argv[3];var sitepage = null;var phInstance = null;phantom.create().then(instance => {phInstance = instance;return instance.createPage();}).then(page => {sitepage = page;return page.open(address);}).then(status => {console.log(status);return sitepage.property('content');}).then(content => {console.log(content);sitepage.render(output);sitepage.close();phInstance.exit();}).catch(error => {console.log(error);phInstance.exit();});3 - use it with:node webtopdf.js https://docushow.com docushow.png

Laurent Denoue

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