Top Four Frequently Asked Questions
What about security (and also testing on localhost) - do I have to make my webpage publicly available?
No - you can send the html (instead of a url) - there is no need to put the page you want to convert publicly on the web. This is also slighly faster as we don't have to download the webpage from the internet.
If I do use the URL option, what security options like SSL are there?
You can use basic authentication and pass in a username and password. Our API supports SSL and also reading from https pages.
Alternatively some customers use a simple token system, e.g. by passing a secret parameter on the url that noone else will know, e.g. www.myurl.com/invoice?secret=abc123. The token could be simple - the same each time, or it could be time based and expire after a minute or so.
What about data privacy?
We take privacy very seriously and we
do not store either the webpage content you sent to us or outputted PDF. Not even in audit trails or exception logs. HTML is processed and sent back to you, and to be perfectly honest, storing all that html, css, images etc or worse, the resulting PDFs would quickly result in terrabytes of useless data that would cost us a lot of money so doesn't make any sense - we also do not have time to sift though tens of thousands of PDF's to find one with something interesting..
Please see our
privacy policy for more details
If I get a bad request when doing a page, what could that be?
The most common reasons are
- You are trying to make our API access your local computer, e.g. localhost, which isn't publically accessible yet. You can pass the HTML instead of the URL if you prefer.
- The HTML (or perhaps css) contains a link to an external file, for example an image, that doesn't exist. Obviously we will try to download the non-existant file which adds to processing time. Press F12 in your browser and take a look at it in console window -- fix most, if not all of the errors in your page.
- Your HTML is complete nonsense. Most of the time we will still be able to generate something anyway, but garbage in garbage out. Run your page through The W3C Validation Service
- You are connecting to an HTTPS page, and you are also trying to reference insecure http resources - not good practise anyway - but it's possible this could be the source of an error.
- The conversion times out because your page has too complex css. This is is a bit rare but rounded corners with gradiated colours or rounded corners on background colours etc arn't loved performance wise. Use a print stylesheet or simplified css and your conversion will go much quicker.
- You are sending HTML rather than urls, and you have a relative reference to a picture or font in your HTML - (e.g. /img/mypicture.jpg instead of http://mysite/img/mypicture.jpg) -- we have no idea where /img/mypicture is stored so use a full http reference to somewhere we can download it from and we will download and embed it in the PDF automatically
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