Have you ever had a client ask you to make a bunch of attractive, printable reports from a database and they want them done tomorrow? They probably also gave you nothing more to go on than what the report should contain and a pencil drawing of how it might lay out.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if they could have just emailed you a Word document of exactly what the report is supposed to look like, you plug in some variables and instantly have a button in your application to run the report whenever they need it?
Based in Columbus, Ohio in the USA, Online PDF Printer was created as a solution to a problem that kept coming up over and over again with customers, which is that they have a website, database or web app that they’d love to generate gorgeous, print-ready PDFs from with no cost-effective way of doing it. Dubbed as the ‘new generation of PDF’, it enables developers to integrate custom, dynamic PDF creation and downloading into their web-enabled applications with just a few lines of code. As simple as that.
The major benefit of Online PDF Printer to developers and end-users is simply the ease and speed with which a developer can create PDFs from a common format that even customers can work with (Microsoft Word / Open Office Writer). Users are not locked into any specific programming language using our website, nor does it even cost anything to get started.
To start, all you need to do is to sign up for an API key and upload your document templates and POST data to their server. A stream of PDF data is passed back to your application and you can save it as a file, prompt the user to download it right then and there or push it into a database. Sounds easy right? Try it out and you will know how beneficial Online PDF Printer can be.
Currently, Online PDF Printer supports Microsoft Word documents (.doc and .docx) as templates but you can use OpenOffice to compose your templates, just make sure that you save your file in Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP format.
As far as the future is concerned, the folks there are looking to expand their offerings considerably. One thing that people have been requesting is simple Word to PDF conversion from their web apps. Usually a site might let a user upload a file via a form and then be emailed a link to their PDF once it’s completed, but according to Kevin, it’s “going to allow users to let their web apps convert documents on-demand”. Besides that, they are also considering providing flat-rate consultation for helping less experienced developers get up and running with Online PDF Printer as quickly as possible.