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PDFDispatch

Getting started

PDFDispatch turns documents into PDF. You send your files or a URL as multipart/form-data and get the PDF back in the answer. Chromium renders HTML, Markdown and web pages; LibreOffice converts Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and many other formats. The API also edits PDFs: merge, split, rotate, encrypt, watermark, metadata, PDF/A and PDF/UA.

Base URL

https://api.pdfdispatch.com

Every route is a POST under /v1/convert/, /v1/screenshot/ or /v1/pdf/, for example https://api.pdfdispatch.com/v1/convert/html.

Quick start

  1. Make an account, then make a key in the web app, under Keys. A key starts with pdd_ and is shown once.
  2. Keep it in an environment variable, for example export PDD_KEY=pdd_...
  3. Convert a web page to PDF:
curl https://api.pdfdispatch.com/v1/convert/url \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $PDD_KEY" \
  --form url=https://example.com \
  --output example.pdf

The answer is 200 OK with the PDF as its body. Every answer carries an X-Request-Id header; quote it when you write to support about a request.

What counts as one PDF

One successful request is one PDF, whatever its number of pages or files. A request that fails (a wrong form field, a page that cannot be reached, a limit, a timeout) counts nothing. The details, and what happens past your plan's PDFs, are in Limits and errors.

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