Generate a document with full height in PHP with cURL

In this guide, we'll show you how to generate a document with full height dynamically using PHP and the cURL library to convert them to PDF using PDFShift's API.

When you're converting a document, you might want to generate a document with full height dynamically. This can be done by setting the format parameter to the request and passing it a custom "auto" value for the {height} part.

# You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
$api_key = 'sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx'

$params = array (
    'source' => 'https://www.example.com',
    'format' => '1280xauto'
)

$curl = curl_init('https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($params));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Content-Type: application/json',
    'Authorization: Basic ' . base64_encode('api:' . $api_key)
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
if ($response === false) {
    $error_message = curl_error($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    throw new Exception("cURL error: $error_message");
}

// Get the HTTP status code
$http_status = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

// Close cURL resource
curl_close($curl);

// Check if the request was successful
if ($http_status !== 200) {
    throw new Exception("Request failed with HTTP status code: $http_status");
}

// Save the file to result.pdf
file_put_contents('result.pdf', $response);

echo 'The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf';

The format parameter can accept various values, such as 'Letter', 'Legal', 'Tabloid', 'Ledger', 'A0', 'A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'A4', 'A5'.

But it can also accept a custom values that is defined per the width and height as follow: {width}x{height}

Both width and height are pixel value by default, but if you precise the unit (in "cm", "mm", "in" or "pt"). That unit will be used instead.

For instance, you can set a format of:

{
    "source": "https://www.example.com",
    "format": "21cmx29,7cm"
}

Now, if you want a "liquid" height, which will analyze the height of the page and use it as your format, you can set the {height} value to auto. So, instead of setting a fixed height such as 'format': '1280x1024', you can set 'format': '1280xauto' and the height will be calculated based on the content of the page.

For further details on the format property and its usage, please refer to our dedicated documentation.

We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions or noticed any issues on the code above,
feel free to drop us a line.