Today, I am pleased to announce that we have launched support for outputting web pages as PDF Files (currently free while in BETA, aside from bandwidth charges).
In short, this feature allows developers to create a PDF file of a web page in two ways:
- Scripted: Use the PagePix PDF BETA script to automate download of PDFs of web pages
- Link: End-users click to present a download dialog prompt to view and download a PDF*
*Example:
<a href="http://images.shrinktheweb.com/xino.php?stwpdf=1&stwu='.SECRET_KEY.'&stwaccesskeyid='.ACCESS_KEY.'&stwinside='.INSIDE_PAGES.'&stwurl=http://www.tacobell.com">PDF of Taco Bell Homepage</a>
This feature supports "Inside Pages" (if you have that upgrade).
One advantage to having a PDF, instead of just an image, is that the PDF has live elements, including working links that will open to the destination URL (helpful for archival purposes).
This feature is also being launched with full support of non-English URLs and web pages with non-English content. Learn more about supported PagePix encoding.
This feature has the following known limitations:
- Does not support Flash (and currently no plans to support it)
- Does not support all Javascript (though quite a bit of javascript worked in testing)*
*Whenever javascript causes a failure, the PDF output may fail and possibly hang the calling script.
The initial goal of this script is to support capture and output of controlled web pages to PDF. That is meaning something where you have the ability to address any issues and ensure that it works properly (as in generating PDFs of HTML-based invoices, etc). However, the feature is not limited, so it "may" work for other purposes as well.
