PDFmyURL: export web pages with JavaScript elements to PDF on shared hosting

Customers and users sometimes ask for an ability to save some reports from web applications to PDF files. It could be very tricky to write PDF directly but as far as you already have those reports on web pages you can add printable views of them and then ability to convert HTML/CSS of the pages to PDF, say with dompdf library.
This way you can hit two targets: add printing of reports and PDF export. Dompdf is still in beta but at least it could work on shared hosting AFAIK.

But what if you need to export web pages with JavaScript canvas elements like Flot charts that are plotted on browser side only? All available solutions require installing executables which is usually problematic on shared hosting.

The solution is PDFmyURL.com/ which you can easily use as a web-service: send GET requests with URL of the page you want to export and get PDF file as a response. The service is based wkhtmltopdf. As you can see, it’s good enough to convert pages with Flot charts:

http://pdfmyurl.com/?url=http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/basic.html.

You can call the service from JavaScript on your pages or from server-side scripts via any HTTP client library like cURL. All wkhtmltopdf options are supported and could be passed as GET request parameters.

Their free service inserts very small watermark to each page which is usually not a problem. But of course you can upgrade to paid service to remove it.

2 thoughts on “PDFmyURL: export web pages with JavaScript elements to PDF on shared hosting”

  1. I got interested in the “Share the Knowledge toolbar”.
    Is it a plugin? or did you create yourself? Nice design of your site.

    Reply

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