Pdfcrowd Blog

In our latest series, we've explored how to leverage the Pdfcrowd cloud-based API for converting web pages and HTML files to PDF, previously using languages such as C and C++. As Rust offers a safer alternative to these languages, this article will guide you through integrating the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API into your Rust applications to achieve robust document conversion solutions. You can download the complete source code from GitHub.

In the previous article in this series we showed how to use the Pdfcrowd API in C to convert web pages and HTML documents to PDF. While it is perfectly fine to use C code in a C++ application, C++ programmers may prefer to integrate the API using modern C++.

You can download the complete C++ code with examples for quick integration into your project.

In this article, we will show how to convert a webpage or an HTML document to PDF in C using the Pdfcrowd API.

We will show the convert() function that provides the conversion functionality. We will demonstrate how to use it to create PDF from various input sources, such as a URL, a local HTML file, or an HTML string. By the end of this article, you should have a good understanding of how to integrate the Pdfcrowd API into your C programs for HTML to PDF conversion.

The API is cloud-based and accessible over HTTP. We will use libcurl to communicate with the API. libcurl is a widely used library available on all major platforms.

To quickly incorporate the Pdfcrowd API into your own code, you can download the complete C code with examples.

The Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API makes it easy to programmatically create fillable PDF forms from standard HTML forms. The API supports most of the HTML form features and, together with support for digital signatures (see Create Digital Signature in PDF), provides an easy way to create PDF forms.

This feature is available starting with Pdfcrowd API client libraries version 5.6.

Simple Example

Add an HTML form field, for example a text input:

<p>Enter name: <input type="text"></p>

Enable generation of fillable PDF forms with the setEnablePdfForms() method:

client.setEnablePdfForms(true)

The resulting PDF will display an interactive input text field.

See: Example PDF, HTML and Code

Postman is a platform for using APIs. You can use it to interact with the Pdfcrowd API and convert between PDF, HTML and various image formats.

Let's first configure the API endpoint and the credentials. This configuration is common for all conversion types.

API endpoint - Select the HTTP POST method and enter the API endpoint: https://api.pdfcrowd.com/convert/

API credentials. The authorization method is Basic Auth. You can use either the demo credentials or your personal API credentials.

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