Show HN: Ready-to-use API to convert any web page to PDF using headless Chrome

[conradk]

Saving a webpage to a PDF is literally one command line away:

chromium --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=google.pdf http://google.com/

What does Apify add in this case?

[jancurn]

You can call the API from anywhere, from resource-constrained servers, Docker containers that cannot run headless Chrome, JavaScript on a website etc. Also, we'll keep adding new features to this act to make it worthwhile to use it, e.g. retries on failures, posting of the file to some URL etc.

[xilni]

This is exactly what I do bundled into a nice function added to my .zshrc

    chromepdf() {
        chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf="$1" $2
    }

[nickjj]

Also if you can't access this command for whatever reason, another option is to open the print dialog box in Chrome and set the destination to "Save as PDF" and it will work. You'll even get to see a preview. It's very useful for 1 off saves where you want to consume a really long post offline in a PDF viewer.

[scaryclam]

Thanks, I didn't know that was a thing. I was checking out wkhtmltox earlier this week as well.

Looks like there are a lot of options available for this. I suspect Apify's using one of them.

[Natsu]

There's also wkhtmltopdf that more or less does the same thing using webkit.

[granda]

Are there any downsides to me using this to build my own archiver?

[Keats]

Is there a way to add a delay to let JS render?

[jotto]

I've been working on something similar: https://www.prerender.cloud/docs/api

  // URL to screenshot
  service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://www.google.com/

  // URL to pdf
  service.prerender.cloud/pdf/https://www.google.com/

  // URL to html (prerender)
  service.prerender.cloud/https://www.google.com/

[FabioFleitas]

Heads up that I'm getting a "Too many requests for the month, sign up for an account at https://www.prerender.cloud/" when trying to go to any of those links.

[nikisweeting]

There are quite a few of these Chrome headless-as-a-service already out there, this is the third time I've seen one posted on HN.

[visarga]

By the way, is there an opposite service that converts PDF's into plain HTML for reading? I know about https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/ but it only works on arXiv PDFs.

[rpedela]

Best one I have found. https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX

[jancurn]

There's another Apify act that extracts text from a PDF using the pdf-text-extract NPM package - see https://www.apify.com/juansgaitan/pdf-scraping If there's any library or tool that can convert PDF to HTML, it will only take a few minutes to setup such an API on Apify.

[jancurn]

Here we go - another Apify act that uses pdf2htmlEX to convert PDF to HTML:

https://www.apify.com/jancurn/pdf-to-html

[jugjug]

Off-topic, but Apify as a service looks really good. I was spinning up a dedicated VM on AWS with Docker installed only to get a simple webscraper running. Apify solves this elegantly and removes an significant pain in my workflow.

[ak39]

Any info how this compares to commercial html to pdf renderers like PrinceXML?

[schneidmaster]

In my experience, Prince is great for static HTML + CSS rendering, but its JavaScript engine is pretty lackluster -- I couldn't get it to work with rendering React components, for example. So it depends a lot on your use case and if you can server-side render everything. It's also pretty pricey[1] -- not that I mind paying for quality software but that sticker could be prohibitive for a lot of folks.

[1] https://www.princexml.com/purchase

[defenestration]

I would like to know that as well. We are using wkhtmltopdf for around 2 years. Had many issues with incompatible css. I considered PrinceXML. Looked solid, but a bit expensive and also lacking some css support. I'm considering switching to Puppeteer / Chrome.

[waddlesworth]

My main concern is support for the CSS3 Paged Media Module.

I have been using PDFReactor for this reason, as wkhtml2pdf and weasyprint have had problems, as will any webkit or chromium based renderer because these layout systems simply do not support paged printing.

[dmmalam]

Also check out https://urlbox.io/. YC alum, super helpful.

[laktek]

I built Screen.rip, which also supports PDF generation. https://screen.rip/#pdf

Screen.rip gives you more control over the generated PDF beyond Puppeteer's options (like it can wait for certain elements to appear, inject CSS or switch to screen stylesheet instead of the print stylesheet).

[phmagic]

I love this service! I think ease of adoption you can allow pre-made scripts to be shared so the non-technical can easily set up work flows that go right into their email. For the technical folks, I think it would be great to have examples of things you can do with Apify that is a hassle to do with your local chrome headless.

Great job!

[nikisweeting]

If you're interested in running your own personal Way-Back machine that uses Chrome headless for archiving (among other methods), check out Bookmark Archiver.

https://github.com/pirate/bookmark-archiver

[sebazzz]

We are not too happy with our EvoPDF license so in the basis this is a good option. However, I do not think this allows adding headers, footers, page numbers etc.

[jeppebemad]

Is there a similar API around that accepts HTML instead of a URL? I’ve build one for my project, but I would prefer to delegate this to an external service.

[chrismorgan]

Bear in mind that you’ll need to either embed all your resources, or only use CORS-enabled resources, or fake the origin for your HTML document so that it can access non-CORS-enabled resources on a particular domain.

Encoding your HTML as a data: URI might work for this service as-is (provided you use no non-CORS-enabled resources). Haven’t tried it.

[jancurn]

We can easily add this feature. So you'd like to pass a single HTML file?

[inferiorhuman]

So something like wkhtmltopdf?

[Robdel12]

Question: does this create accessible PDFs? That would be a really nice _possible_ work around for screen reader users having issues with a website.

[jancurn]

I believe it's possible, by adding something like "scale: 1.5" to "pdfOptions" you might render an accessible PDF

[tehlike]

you could rpobably launch this service free, and someone will probably create a docker image, and make it one click.

[colordrops]

As long as GPU support is not functional in headless, "any web page" is a misnomer. A large enough percentage of sites use GPU acceleration so that headless mode is useless. This needs to be addressed by the Chrome team.

[kyberias]

What do you mean "use GPU acceleration"? Are you saying that a large percentage of sites use WebGL? Using GPU acceleration for web page rendering is just a browser performance optimization. They can render the same page without GPU only slower.

[panda888888]

Does this work if the page is behind a password/SSO wall?

And is it possible to print multiple Chrome tabs?

Printing pages to PDF is pretty straightforward. It's the above two issues were I've run into problems. Anyone know of a good solution to the second one?

[gbrits]

Assuming you want this done automatically, what's the advantage of 'printing' multiple tabs to PDF in a headless browser, over just sequentially loading and printing the pages you want done?

[laktek]

You can give https://screen.rip/#pdf a try. It supports capturing pages behind auth.

[jancurn]

Not yet, but we can quite easily add these features. Just let me know at [email protected] what would you need

[nikisweeting]

Chrome headless does, just specify the --user-data-dir parameter to give it a profile to use (a profile where you're authenticated to the site you want to snapshot).

e.g.

chrome --disable-gpu --headless --user-data-dir=/Users/username/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default https://example.com/paywall/article.html

Alternatively, use puppeteer to script the auth process. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer