Convert part(s) of a webpage to PDF

With a business license we allow you to select which part(s) of a webpage you want to convert to PDF and/or which part(s) you want to leave out of the conversion. You will be able to do this with both the API as well as your save as PDF links on your webpages.

This is useful when you want to do something like:

  1. Convert only the content of a webpage and leave out the header, footer and/or sidebar.
  2. Offer more than one 'save this part of the page as PDF' link on a page for different areas, such as graphs, tables or articles.
  3. Hide pieces of content from the PDF, such as the 'save as PDF' link itself for example.
  4. Offer a different version of a webpage for the PDF, but you don't want to use or change the CSS media print stylesheet.
  5. Quickly grab pieces of a webpage and rearrange them into a PDF in a different order.

How does it work?

This functionality will only work if you indicate the areas, which you want to show or hide, with an id. If you're not familiar with CSS ids then please head over to a lesson, such as this one. A lot of CMSs (such as WordPress) already do this for relevant sections like the header, footer etc.

After you have indicated the sections in your webpage, you can use the content parameter to select the sections that you want to show or hide. Please see the examples to the right on how to do this.

NOTE: an id is case-sensitive and can only contain letters, digits, underscores (_), hyphens (-), colons (:) and points (.). So do NOT include a #, & or other irrelevant characters when you pass them!

NOTE: if you want to show more than one section, then the order in which you pass them determines how they show up! So &content[header]=show&content[footer]=show has a different result than &content[footer]=show&content[header]=show!

NOTE: you can also use custom CSS to accomplish the same things in many cases - the API has a css parameter for this and our members area also allows you to set custom CSS!

Examples

This part of the page is indicated with the id Example1 with the HTML <div id="Example1">...</div>.

If we want to convert ONLY this area to PDF, then we would add &content[Example1]=show to our link or API call.

If we want to leave out ONLY this area of the PDF, then we would add &content[Example1]=hide to our link or API call.

Convert the examples to PDF!

Convert page without examples to PDF!

You can also show/hide more than one section by using multiple content parameters:

Convert without examples and notes to PDF!

Only the notes and examples to PDF!