PDF Render Tool

Plenty of older business systems still produce plain text. ERPs, accounting and order-processing packages, stock and warehouse systems, anything that prints fixed-width reports or spools to a line printer. The invoices, statements and delivery notes they generate come out as flat text with no styling.

This tool turns that text into a tidy, branded PDF. Really though, it's here to help you find the right settings. Load a sample of your output, adjust the options until the preview looks right, then take those settings away and use them in your own setup. The rendering itself runs on the API. This page is just where you work out the configuration.

1. Load your text, or hit "Try a sample document" below to see it working.
2. Add a letterhead PDF if you want one sitting behind the text, plus a monospace font to embed if you need it.
3. Adjust the options until everything lines up. The ones that usually matter are Lines/page (how long a page is in your source), Skip each page (removes a header line that repeats at the top of every page) and Encoding (use cp850 for old box-drawing characters).
4. Take the settings. Use "Copy as curl" for the exact request, or just read the values off the panel, and drop them into your integration.

Your files aren't stored. They're only sent across to build the preview. A proper write-up is on its way to the blog.