Using your own HTML to PDF server

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF API, HTML to PDF conversion, HTML to PDF SDK.

At the end of the last year we wrote about our new process of setting you up on an unmetered shared or private server. Before then it always took us a few days to get you completely set up, but now it typically takes one business day or – in cases where you’d like an unmetered account on a shared server that has open spots – a couple of minutes.

In this post we’d like to address the limitations of these different servers and the differences in use compared to our regular plans.

Limitations

First of all let’s make it clear that both the unmetered shared server account as well as the private server account allow for as many conversions as the server can handle. In the case of the private server you are free to use that capacity however you like and you have 8 cores and virtually unlimited bandwidth at your disposal. You can also ask for multiple private servers with a load balancer if you run an insane amount of conversions, but that’s a different topic.

For the unmetered shared account there are two important limitations. These are basically the same limitations that apply to all our plans i.e.:

  1. You can only access the server for one conversion at a time. If we’re still processing a conversion for you, you can not request another conversion to start at the same time. We actually prevent you from doing so, by blocking additional incoming connections from the same account during the conversion process.
    By doing this we always have enough capacity on our servers to serve the customers that share the server with you.
  2. Each conversion can take a maximum of 60 seconds to complete. Again, this is to protect other customers against resource hogging on the servers.

Differences in usage compared to regular services

All functionality that’s available in our regular services (such as the HTML to PDF API and SDK) is available to you when you sign up for an unmetered or private server account. So you’ll get access to all of these (as opposed to a singular service). You can choose whichever you want to use.

Other than that you’ll have to call the API and SDK a little different. This is because we’ll give you a different subdomain to use.This is because you can only use the specific server that we reserved for you and not the other general servers.

For the API this means you will not be calling europe.htm2pdf.co.uk/urltopdf?apikey=…. but sharedX.htm2pdf.co.uk/urltopdf?apikey=….

For the SDK you will be setting the subdomain by calling $pdf->SetServer(‘sharedX’); if sharedX is the subdomain that we assign to you.

I hope it helps you understand how easy the whole process is and what you need to do to get up and running. If your company wants to outsource the HTML to PDF creation process and wants to be sure it’s done professionally – then get in touch or sign up!

Convert happily into the New Year!

Posted by & filed under Service announcements.

The team of HTM2PDF would like to wish you and your loved ones a great New Year and we hope that you’re having wonderful holidays!

You can rest assured that in the new year we’ll be trying our best to improve our service even more and stay ahead of the pack with new features, speed improvements and great customer service.

Like we hope that you convert into the new year successfully, we’ll make sure to keep converting your HTML into PDF successfully!

Have a good one!

Your own server for PDF creation in one day!

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF conversion, PDF tooling, Service announcements.

Wow – this has been an exciting week! We’ve managed to setup a really fast server setup process in our company. The result is faster delivery of a custom server to you than ever before!

Of course regular users have always been able to get instant access to our services upon sign-up. This was always one of our greatest assets and still is. It takes literally 2 minutes to sign up and start converting!

But now there’s good news for customers, who would like to have unlimited access to our services. We already offered custom services on request (and still do), but now we have added two standard umlimited packages to our portfolio:

  1. unmetered package
    With this package you will be set up on a server, which you share with a maximum of 4 other umetered accounts. You can choose between servers in Asia, Europe and the USA and you can have access within one business day and often within a few hours of receiving your request.
    Restrictions are only that you can not convert documents that take longer than 60secs to process and that you are competing for resources with other customers (if any). These servers run with 8 CPUs and can easily handle thousands of conversions a day.
  2. private server package
    With this package you will get your own VPS and subdomain on htm2pdf.co.uk, where you will unlimited access to all our services. You can choose between servers in Asia, Europe and the USA.
    VPS requirements can be tailored to your needs as well as an SLA if needed. This package can also be delivered in one business day. For this package we can also discuss hosting in different locations than just the ones offered by our default hosting partner.

It still remains possible to add custom features and special requests. So hopefully you’ll find this addition just as exciting as we do!

If you have questions about these possibilities – send us an email!

Faster, faster, faster

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF API, HTML to PDF conversion, HTML to PDF SDK, Service announcements.

Today we’re pleased to announce that we’re doing more performance improvements to our systems, which we’ll be rolling out over the next weeks. As always, we look forward to your feedback if you have any.

One of the things we’re doing is very good news for our HTML to PDF SDK and API users. We’re going to split our servers over two locations and will allow you to choose where you use your resources.

Although our conversion service is one of the fastest (if not the fastest!) conversion services out there, this will especially help you if are converting huge files. Not so much because of the conversion process itself, but mostly because you will reduce latency because we’ll be serving the resulting PDF from a closer location. Our own measurements show that depending on your location you may expect quite dramatic improvements.

Precise implementation details will be announced on our blog and the documentation pages as soon as we have tested all the implementations ourselves and with our beta-test users.

We’re also considering acquiring servers in the Asia region. If you have any other suggestions related to performance improvements – please contact us!

HTML to PDF conversion and @page implementation

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF API, HTML to PDF conversion, HTML to PDF SDK.

In this post we’ll shine some light on the level of CSS support that our conversion engine offers. As you can see all over the site we support CSS, quite some CSS2 and some CSS3. To be precise, you can see in this article on Wikipedia how Webkit compares against other rendering engines as far as CSS goes.

Now most of our users (and people / companies interested in becoming users) are completely happy with all that. Actually – most are already impressed with the fact that we offer HTML5, Canvas, JavaScript and the level of CSS2/CSS3 that we do for our HTML to PDF conversion.

But one question that comes back from time to time is about the @page directive. The @page directive has been proposed to be part of CSS2 with the idea that it would be helpful for paged media. And since PDF is “sort of” a paged media, it appears to be quite useful.

To make a long story short – we do NOT offer @page support in our version of Webkit. And to be frank – we don’t think the ‘nightly build’ (as is specified on the development website) offers that support either. We know that, because we tried to implement it and have talked to its developers, who have long left the project.

But to offer some more positive news – we have a very useful alternative, which we’ve developed some time ago. It was inspired by a client that wanted to use @page to implement company stationary (so basicly the pre-printed paper you see lying around at all the big companies with logo / letterhead etc.). Because we feel that this type of functionality was very useful we added it to our HTML to PDF API as well as to the HTML to PDF SDK.

With this functionality you choose between three different ‘stationary backgrounds’ that can be applied to your PDF documents. These are:

  • one for the first page
  • one for all pages between the first and last page (if not specified, the first stationary background will apply)
  • one for the last page

We accept all major image formats as input for these backgrounds and we also allow you to place them at any position you want or scale them to fit the whole page.

With this functionality we hope that you can at least cover some of the functionality that the @page directive was created for. It’s been live for quite a few months now and working flawlessly so we invite you to take advantage of it!

Help wanted – HTML to PDF in Turkish

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF conversion.

In our last post we proudly announced our latest website – a HTML to PDF conversion service in Spanish! And although HTMLaPDF.com.com has only been live for a couple of weeks, people are finding there way to it already.

Because of this we would like to expand our services into other terrains and we are looking forward to your help. We have recently started a new project – in Turkish – at the site HTMLdenPDF.com. Unfortunately we’re not able to complete it successfully at the time and we are therefore looking for someone to help us out.

If you’re a native Turkish speaker, with knowledge of IT, a passion for our services AND a drive to help us build our market in Turkish – then we’d love to have you in our team.

Please contact us and we’d love to discuss possibilities with you!

Spanish HTML to PDF conversion site HTMLaPDF.com launched!

Posted by & filed under Service announcements.

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of HTMLaPDF.com – our HTML to PDF conversion service, fully available and supported in Spanish!

We have been helping many visitors over the years,for which the preferred language is Spanish, and that’s why we decided to take our succesful HTM2PDF.co.uk website and completely translate it to Spanish AND make sure we can support questions and sales related inquiries in that language as well.

The reason we choose the name ‘HTMLaPDF.com’ is because ‘HTML a PDF’ means ‘HTML to PDF’, which is the main term that people recognize the service that we perform by.

You may be pleased to know that we will offer the same kinds of services on our Spanish domain as on our current website. So, besides the free conversion on the main page, our Spanish site also has:

  • save as PDF plans for companies and individuals
  • a HTML to PDF API for web sites and applications
  • the HTML to PDF SDK for power users in PHP

If you want to check it out – the please visit the new website and be sure to leave us feedback or recommend us on your favorite social network!

Custom services for HTML to PDF conversion

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF conversion.

From time to time we get requests to offer custom services. Since these are only modestly advertised on the ‘plans page‘, I am taking the time here to explain some of them here.

We currently offer our three services in three different plans, which totals nine plans. For most of our users this is more than enough. In fact, 80-90% of our orders is for 6 of those plans only.

Still, the most requested custom service is to have a custom usage plan, albeit for a larger or smaller number of credits OR for a different time frame. Both are possible and we have applied both in the past. Some of the plans you could request are:

  • a yearly plan instead of a monthly plan (for the API or the SDK)
  • a plan with higher or lower usage
  • a prepaid number of credits for a longer period of time

All of those types of plans are available and have been offered and/or running in the past.

We can also offer more specific custom services than just these basic variations on usage and credit periods. These are usually a little bit more elaborate, because they would require us to do more custom work.

We can offer you:

  • one or more dedicated VPS systems to run your HTML to PDF conversion; this is very useful if you need a high volume of conversions and/or if you want private access only to the system;  We can deploy a VPS very quickly and will deploy it in the region closest to your website’s audience.
  • a server install of our software in case you have a Linux based server; this is useful if you want to own the software yourself and want to install it in a private network and manage it yourself.
  • html to pdf conversion consulting services; if you have custom jobs, want to know more about the requirements for high volume conversion or have any other specific assignment on HTML to PDF or PDF in general – you can hire us for consulting services.

Basically the above says ‘everything is possible for a price’. We encourage you to reach out with any questions you may have, cause there’s a high chance that we can do something for you. If we can’t we’ll definitely be able to help you in the right direction so it’s always a good chance to try!

Just as a friendly reminder – here is the overview of all our standard plans!

Choosing the best HTML to PDF conversion service

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF conversion, PDF tooling.

Today we’re going to look at a few criteria, which we use to measure ourselves against the competition. We do not only believe we ARE the best HTML to PDF conversion service out there, but we’ll try to explain in this post why we feel that way and which criteria we use to try to improve our service.

We use the following criteria to judge our own HTML to PDF conversion services:

  1. Functionality
  2. Ease of Use
  3. Performance
  4. Value for money

We pay attention to all these four criteria and we often notice that whether or how we add certain functionality, is affected by implications to ease of use or performance. As an example: when we recently added our ‘merging’ functionality (see our blog post for the SDK and the one for the API), we made sure it would not affect performance in any way and it would not affect ease of use at all, by adding it as a complete new function.

Now let’s look at these criteria in more detail.

Functionality

As you’re reading this post you’re most likely aware that there are more html to pdf conversion services out there. Most of these do some part of what we do (reasonably) well, but what we take pride in is that we do all parts well and that there are many parts that we do.

We actually offer FOUR distinct services, which is already more than any other competitor:

  1. Save as PDF functionality – this allows visitors of a website to save a webpage as PDF with just one click
  2. HTML to PDF API – this easy to use API allows developers to convert HTML to PDF
  3. HTML to PDF SDK – this powerful development toolkit in PHP allows developers to convert HTML to PDF with great power and flexibility
  4. HTML forms to PDF – our other service pdfmyform.com allows visitors of a website to save a webpage WITH form content as PDF with just one click

Now right of the bat, no other conversion services offers this many choices and none (currently) offers a service that can convert filled-in HTML forms to PDF. We’re the first in that – worldwide!

Second, we offer the following other features, that you can not find in any other service or certainly not in combination:

  • Merging of multiple sources – we are the only provider that will allow you to create PDFs, by merging together other PDFs you created with our service; This is great if you’re making catalogs, e-books, brochures or other – bigger – PDFs.
  • Stationary – we offer the possibility to add a (full) page background to your PDF, which you can use for example as company stationary
  • Watermarking & stamping – we offer two different ways of watermarking: adding a text or adding an image. You can control all characteristics of these watermarks as well.
  • Rights management – you control many Adobe Rights Management options, such as encryption, copy protection and print protection.
  • Single page PDF – you can convert your documents into one long PDF page, without page breaking. Your PDF is automatically clipped to the right length.

And then of course there are all the standard options such as page sizing, margins, header and footer and what not. You will also find that using these options is very straight-forward.

Ease of use

Our goal is that all our services should be ready to use out of the box. That’s why we created a members area, that allows you to set all your defaults with a few clicks and without confusion. In most cases this already makes sure that you don’t have to use any of the parameters of the services itself.

But if you still want to control more options, we at least make sure that they’re easy to use AND that they’re well documented. Each service has extensive documentation pages and we try to make all the options self-explanatory and the same across all our services.

On top of that we offer examples in our documentation that will help you be on your way instantly. It really doesn’t get easier than this!

Performance

Whenever we try to improve performance we think of the following characteristics:

  • Speed
  • Reliability
  • Scope of use

In terms of speed we make sure of a few things. First we ensure that we have the right hardware running at all times and it’s tuned to convert your HTML as fast as possible. For that we make use of the newest processors and we have enough CPUs and memory to handle the highest loads possible. Our average server load is less than 10% of the maximum capacity.

Another, just as important part of speed, is the conversion tool itself. Our conversion tool is developed with performance in mind and is optimized as much as possible for speed.

Our service’s reliability is ensured by hosting at the right provider (in our case Linode) and by meticulously planning upgrades in advance. You can rest assured that we will not have unplanned downtime and that we will inform you on our blog and over twitter of any upcoming upgrades. Whenever we do have server upgrades we try to limit the downtime to a maximum of 5 minutes and execute these at times where usage is the least.

Scope of use is another thing that we’re very concerned about. We want our services to be usable by anyone in any country. Although our website is in English only, we also are able to respond to inquiries in other languages such as German, Spanish and Dutch. And our conversion service is equipped to convert documents in as many character sets possible (Asian, Cyrillic, Arabic etc.). Also, we’re supporting as much HTML5, CSS and JavaScript as Webkit can comfortably handle.

Value for money

We strongly believe that a good service warrants a price and that’s why all our services (except the free conversion service on the homepage) have a price tag. We also believe that this price tag should be fair and represent the service that you receive and the market value of that service.

The criteria above are all reasons why we believe that our pricing is more than reasonable, but there’s one more that I’d like to mention: CUSTOMER SERVICE. Whenever you ask us questions, we will respond to you within the shortest of time frames. Usually this will be within an hour or two, but certainly within 24 hours. And when we do respond you can rest assured it’s with information that you can actually use and are helped with.

Hopefully all the above will help you take a decision in choosing your HTML to PDF service and hopefully the choice will be for us. If so, we’d be very happy. But if you disagree with any of the points we mentioned then we definitely would also love to hear from you. We are committed to continuous improvement and will take any help we can get!

One last thing – if you want to sign up – you can do it here!

Pdfmyform.com – convert filled-in forms to PDF!

Posted by & filed under HTML to PDF conversion, PDF tooling, Save as PDF.

We are proudly announcing the launch of pdfmyform.com, our newest site that allows visitors of a webpage to save the webpage, WITH the form contents they filled-in, to PDF in a single click.

Why is this so special?

Well, normally a web service can only convert a webpage as-is, which means as you would see it when you would enter the address yourself for the first time. This is because the rendering engine visits the page from a separate server and therefore has no knowledge of the form contents a visitor just filled in.

So when a visitor clicks a link to a web service, all other web services will give them a PDF of that page without any of the content they just filled in. And of course – in varying levels of quality.

We are now the first web service that offers this kind of functionality and we make sure you can get this up and running in a matter of minutes – just like our other services. Have a look at the demo here!

How does it work?

By just adding a single line of JavaScript to your web page, and then a link to the web service of pdfmyform.com, you are up and running. This is explained at the pdfmyform How It Works page.

The JavaScript, that you include on your web page, sends the form data to our web service, when you click the link to our web service. In that way know how to convert the web page properly, as we now also have the form field contents. This sounds quite easy, but in reality it takes quite a bit of technical expertise to get this working reliable and fast.

Who needs this?

Well – quite frankly, quite a lot of people! Cause there’s a lot of need for PDFs with user content and normally you’d have to do quite a bit of server side coding to recreate the webpage with the content after submission and then you’d have to execute your own conversion as well. As if the conversion itself is not difficult enough!

Moreover – our service will work out of the box for ALL your forms. And when you modify the form – you don’t need to do anything! It will just keep churning away silently and reliably.

So for all your questionnaires, product configurations, sales quotes, survey forms, etc etc – go ahead and head over to pdfmyform.com – try it for free and sign up when you’re convinced!