Pdfcrowd Blog

New:

We added a new method which sets a mobile user agent to use for conversion.

• setUseMobileUserAgent()

We have relased a new version of our Save as PDF and Save as Image WordPress plugins.

New:

• Added the "Use Mobile User Agent" option to use a mobile user agent in the "URL" conversion mode.

Pdfcrowd website has been restructured. Main changes:

• We added the API preview page: https://pdfcrowd.com/web-to-pdf-preview/.
• Breadcrumb navigation is now available in some sections of the web site.
• The API reference documentation has been moved to separate pages.
• The online conversion form has been moved from the main page to https://pdfcrowd.com/save-as-pdf-addon/.

API clients have been updated to version 5.2.2 and WordPress plugins to version 2.6.2 to reflect the changes in the API reference.

We have relased a new version of our Save as PDF and Save as Image WordPress plugins.

Changed:

• Minor link update in the plugin documentation.

We have relased a new version of our Save as PDF and Save as Image WordPress plugins.

New:

• Added the "URL Lookup" option to select how to retrieve URLs for Conversion Mode-URL.
• Added the "Diagnostics" option that displays useful info about the button settings.

Changed:

• Minor text update in the plugin settings.

Fixed:

• Minor fix in the plugin settings.

In this tutorial you will learn how to add header and footer to PDF created by Pdfcrowd API. We will use PHP for illustrative purposes, but the code would be essentially the same in all languages the API supports.

Step-by-Step Example

Let's start with instantiating the Pdfcrowd client and setting the page format to Letter:

$client = new \Pdfcrowd\HtmlToPdfClient($user_name, $api_key);
$client->setPageSize('Letter');

The next step is to design our HTML footer and header. We can use special CSS classes that will be expanded as follows:

• pdfcrowd-page-count - the total page count of printed pages
• pdfcrowd-page-number - the current page number
• pdfcrowd-source-url - the source URL of the main document

Footer

The footer HTML containing the current page number and the total number of pages can look like this:

<div style="text-align: right; background-color: gray;">
  Page 
  <span class="pdfcrowd-page-number"></span>
  of
  <span class="pdfcrowd-page-count" style="font-weight: bold"></span>
  pages
</div>

Here is a preview of our footer:

Header

The header HTML containing a logo image and the link to the converted document can look as follows:

<div style="text-align: center; padding: 10pt 0;">
  <img src="https://static.htmltopdf.dev/images/icon2.svg" 
       style="height: 0.2in; margin-right: 24pt;" alt="the logo">
  <a class="pdfcrowd-source-url" data-pdfcrowd-placement="href-and-content"></a>
</div>

The data-pdfcrowd-placement attribute set to href-and-content determines that the link will be assigned to the href attribute and also to the element's text content.

Here is a preview of our header:

Call the API

Now we can pass our header and footer to the API:

$client->setHeaderHtml('<div> ... </div>');
$client->setFooterHtml('<div> ... </div>');

Or we can load them via HTTP:

$client->setHeaderUrl('https://your-domain/footer.html');
$client->setFooterUrl('https://your-domain/header.html');

The following code will make them 0.7' tall:

$client->setHeaderHeight('0.7in');
$client->setFooterHeight('0.7in');

Let's finish our application and request the API to convert our test page to PDF.

$client->convertUrlToFile('https://pdfcrowd.com/demo/', 'result.pdf');

You can find the complete code and the resulting PDF in the API Playground. The API playground also shows the code in other supported languages.

Notes

• Footer and header HTML are regular HTML files and can contain JavaScript and CSS.
• Page number can be formatted in different ways: arabic, roman, eastern-arabic, bengali, devanagari, thai, east-asia and chinese-formal. The desired format is defined by the attribute data-pdfcrowd-number-format.
• Pdfcrowd provides other API methods and special CSS classes so that you can create advanced documents with e.g. different header on the first page and last page or different header for single page and multipage output.
• The footer and header height are independent of the page margins, the following figure depicts the page layout:

  

Fixed:

• Methods for getting conversion information (e.g. getRemainingCreditCount) returned incorrect values in some cases.

Fixed:

• Resolved the warning displayed when installing the package.

We have relased a new version of our Save as PDF and Save as Image WordPress plugins.

New:

• Added the "Indicator Timeout" option to set the maximum time the progress indicator is displayed. 

Changed:

• The "HTTP Auth User Name", "HTTP Auth Password", "Cookies", "Fail On Main URL Error" and "Fail On Any URL Error" options are taken into account in the Upload conversion mode.
• Minor source code optimization.

Fixed:

• Fixed saving of the plugin options.
• Minor fix of the progress indicator.

Image to PDF:

• Significant speedup of TIFF CCITT image to PDF conversions.

Minor changes:

• The converter version and elapsed time are now recorded in debug logs.
• Improved PDF to PDF converter error messages.