Export to PDF - overview
CKEditor Cloud Services offer a fast and highly scalable service enabling the user to export documents to PDF document. The feature is available as a service, making it possible to send an HTML string straight into the Cloud Services server for more advanced use or as convenient WYSIWYG editor plugins for the ease of use in less demanding cases.
This is a premium feature. You can purchase a license here or contact us for a tailored offer. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions!
If this feature is used without authentication, the resulting document will be watermarked.
# Pagination feature
The complementary premium pagination feature for CKEditor 5 allows you to see where page breaks would be after the document is exported to PDF. Thanks to the live preview, the user is able to fine-tune the structure of the output document when editing it. In addition to this, the pagination feature shows you the page count and allows to easily navigate between the document pages.
# How the Export to PDF feature works
The HTML to PDF converter provides an API for converting HTML documents to PDF files. The service generates a file and returns it to the user so they can save it in the .pdf format on their disk. To integrate the feature into your environment, first check the Quick start guide to start using it.
You can also test the feature using the export to PDF demo page.
# The HTML to PDF converter options
The following options are available, while using the converter service:
At least one of html, options.header_html or options.footer_html parameters is required to generate a PDF.
Any of these parameters cannot contain the <meta> tag with the refresh document interval.
If you want to use this API directly, you need to provide proper CSS code manually. To achieve this, you should pass a string which is a concatenation of the default editor styles (refer to the CKEditor 5’s content styling guide) and, optionally, your custom styles to the css property. With the default editor configuration, you do not need to specify the options property.
# HTML
Any HTML compliant content can be sent to the converter.
The API only accepts documents with UTF-8 encoded content for conversion.
- All HTML documents use the
<!DOCTYPE html>declaration to generate PDF files. - The recommended way to generate a PDF document is to send only the HTML content. However, if your document requires a full HTML structure to render properly, you can use it.
# CSS
This option is used to send custom CSS styles.
Just like the HTML, CSS must be encoded with UTF-8.
If you cannot use UTF-8 and would like to request support for other charsets, please contact us.
# Options
The PDF options make it possible to set a header, footer, margins and page format of the output file. There is also the wait_time parameter to control the render time.
Refer to the converter documentation for details on the syntax and usage of these options.
# Images
Images can be either inserted from a URL or Base64-encoded, using the src attribute of the <img> tag.
# Web Fonts
To generate PDF documents, you can use web fonts like in a regular browser. You need to specify the URL to the font file or a font file converted to the Base64 format.
Please note that web fonts are not supported in both the header and footer body and styles.
For header and footer, use one of the default fonts.
Refer to the converter documentation for details and examples.
# The Export to PDF editor plugin
The Export to PDF CKEditor plugin allows you to easily print the WYSIWYG editor content to a PDF file. When enabled, this feature sends the content of your editor together with the styles that are used to display it to the CKEditor Cloud Services HTML to PDF converter service. The service then generates a PDF document that the user can download.
Thanks to this plugin, it takes exactly one button click to get a PDF file with content formatted the same way as displayed in the CKEditor WYSIWYG editor. An easy solution for integrations, that does not demand editor data to be processed further once it is edited.
# Stored data
Export to PDF is a service that generates PDF files based on the data provided by the customer (HTML, CSS). To perform the conversion, it requires the data sent from the editor or a database, but the service itself is fully stateless.
The data (especially your sensitive data: HTML, CSS, comments) is used only during the processing. However, we store some information needed for billing and maintaining our system. We try to reduce stored data to a required minimum and at this moment we store such information as the number and duration of exports, the final document size, the number of unique exports, statistical data (used features, IP addresses, editor versions).
All logs related to processing requests are saved only in case of unexpected situations and are stored for 14 days. The data in logs includes an error message, stack trace and information about the request.