CloudConvert Blog

The CloudConvert website / HTML to PDF, JPG and PNG converter is often used to generate PDF files or thumbnails.  Currently, we are using a proven, WebKit-based engine. However, there are use cases that require an even more modern rendering. We are currently experimenting  with automating the Chrome browser for this matter.

There is a new option available to enable Chrome for converting HTML files or websites. This option is named “use_chrome” when using our API.

Please note that currently not all of the pre-existing options are available when using Chrome instead of the current engine. The possible options are:

When converting to PDF:

• Page orientation
• Custom page size (defaults to A4)
• Page margins
• Zoom factor

When converting to JPG/PNG:

• Screen width (defaults to 1024)
• Screen height (defaults to fir the content height)
• Zoom factor
• Resize to specific size

We are looking forward to get your feedback about this new feature. In particular we are interested if there are any formatting issues or if there are required options missing.

Our Amazon S3 integration is a well used feature. Besides S3 we now have integrated OpenStack Storage (Swift), Microsoft Azure File Storage and Google Cloud Storage. You can use any of these file storage solutions as input and output for CloudConvert conversions. Our API Console has been updated and can be used to live-test the new storage options.

We are happy to announce that CloudConvert is now fully integrated with Zapier! Using Zapier you can connect CloudConvert to 500+ other Apps like Evernote, Basecamp, Gmail, Trello, Slack and so many others. Below you can find some ideas for possible “Zaps”.

We are looking forward to see your workflows and use cases for Zapier!

When creating PDF files from DOCX or PPTX files CloudConvert can now dynamically change the content. This feature makes it more convenient to create invoices or mass letters dynamically. Technically you set up a DOCX template with placeholders (for example ${name}). While converting the DOCX file to PDF CloudConvert can replace these placeholders with custom values. This even works for tables with a variable amount of rows as the following example shows.

The shown PDF was created using the DOCX template file and these few lines of PHP code:

$api->convert([
    "input" => "upload",
    "inputformat" => "docx",
    "outputformat" => "pdf",
    "converteroptions" => [
       "templating" => [
          "name" => "John Smith",
          "address" => "Smithstreet 1",
          "city" => "Smithtown",
          "zip" => "10101",
          "country" => "US",
          "comment" => "Thanks for your business!",
          "date" => "2015-11-24",
          "total" => "160",
          "items" => [
            ["description" => "Nameless product", "price" => "10", "quantity" => "2", "total" => "20"],
            ["description" => "Other product", "price" => "100", "quantity" => "1", "total" => "100"],
            ["description" => "Stuff", "price" => "2", "quantity" => "20", "total" => "40"],
            ],
        ],
    ],
    "file" => fopen('template.docx', 'r'),
])

Checkout the full Syntax for the placeholders of the new templating feature.

We think this feature is a great step to make CloudConvert even more powerful and we hope you like it!

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could do

cloudconvert -f pdf *.docx

to convert all DOCX files in the current folder to PDF?

Now you can do so! We just released the official CloudConvert CLI. Checkout the full documentation for more examples and how to install it on your machine.