How to Automatically Convert a Webpage into a PDF Document

Sometimes in web development you need to save a webpage as a PDF document, this could be for example to turn an online invoice or report into a downloadable copy that can be kept as a permanent record or shared. While there are libraries that enable PDF documents to be constructed piece at a time, one of the best ways to convert a webpage to PDF would just be to pass the URL of the webpage you want to convert to PDF to GrabzIt's URL to PDF API. This free API is available in eight programming languages allowing you to create PDF's in JavaScript, PHP, Python and much more. Simply pass your URL to the API and your finished PDF will be returned a few seconds later. In the PHP example shown below it only takes four lines of code to convert a webpage to PDF.

• include("GrabzItClient.class.php");
• $grabzIt = new GrabzItClient("Your Application Key", "Your Application Secret");
• $grabzIt->URLToPDF("http://www.example.com/invoice.php");
• $grabzIt->SaveTo("invoice.pdf");

One important point to remember, especially when converting modern webpages is that they are often designed to be responsive to the size of the webpage. Therefore, specifying the browser width parameter can determine if a mobile version or a desktop version of a webpage is converted to PDF. However, as some webpages have content that matches the browser width in some circumstances it may be more useful to pass a -1 to this parameter which makes the browser width match the PDF page width instead. rnOf course, the URL to PDF API can also do much more sophisticated PDF conversions for example creating custom headers and footers that can except special parameters allowing all sorts of content to be inserted when each header or footer is created, to custom page sizes and merging multiple PDF documents into one. Being able to merge multiple PDF documents together would allow an entire website to be turned into a PDF document providing a excellent way of archiving a website as it appears at a certain point in time. rnWhat we have provided here is only a sample of what can be done when converting webpages to PDF with our API, to find out for yourself how flexible our API is get your free API key and get started experimenting need now. Alternatively, if you don't like to write code, GrabzIt also has a online screenshot tool that allows you to convert webpages to PDF with almost all of the same options as our API.