Frequently Asked Questions

1. Automatically converting a website price list into a PDF that your users can download
2. Enabling a user to e-mail an article to a friend as a PDF
3. Converting an online receipt or invoice into a PDF for download
4. Allowing existing PDF content to be stored in a more accessible way for access by disabled users or those with restricted technologies.
5. Making sales and marketing brochures available as web pages for users and search engine access
6. Easy maintenance of user manuals without multiple formats
7. News feeds, blogs, articles, brochures, white papers
8. Application forms
9. Technical or job specifications
10. Price lists
11. Product or service specifications
12. Dynamic user-generated content (such as invoices, application forms, etc)
13. Multi-media - embed music and video as flash objects inside the PDF
14. Controlling versions of terms and conditions, contracts, usage policies

No. Absolutely not. All our plans come with a two week free trial period, where you can try the product, and test its integration into your own website. If you like it, sign up. If not, walk away. Once you're happy, sign up for a monthly plan. You can cancel or upgrade whenever you wish

FourPDF takes a webpage address, or URL, and converts it into a PDF. The clever bit is that you don't need any programming skills to make use of it - just paste the URL we send you into your website.

When you sign up to our free trial, you will be e-mailed a URL that will look like this:

http://fourpdf.com/ConvertUrl?AccountToken=0f8f73de-8738-4d98-b587-f0cb74cbe743 
&requestedUrl=http://yourdomain.com

The account token is unique to your account, and identifies you. The requested URL is the page you'd like to be converted to a PDF and returned to the user.

So how do you use this URL?

Imagine you wanted to allow your user to view a PDF of a particular news article on your site. Let's say that the page is http://yourdomain.com/news/20091008_special_announcement

To provide the user with a link to click on to receive this page, you'd just create an anchor somewhere in that page, like this:

<a href="http://fourpdf.com/ConvertUrl?AccountToken=0f8f73de-8738-4d98-b587-f0cb74cbe743 
&requestedUrl=http://yourdomain.com/news/20091008_special_announcement">
Click here for a PDF of this page</a>

This will provide a link on the page that will dynamically create a PDF of that page.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though. You can do all sorts of clever things with the addition of a good content management system in the background. Why not serve them a page with the same content, but formatted for print instead of web? Just use a different template that loads a different stylesheet! Want to send it by e-mail? Don't return the PDF to the screen, but instead attach to an e-mail. See below for some more clever options.

Give it a go! Our homepage has a "Try It Now!" box, where you can enter your URL, and have it converted into a PDF (remember to switch off your pop-up blocker!). We've tested it on lots and lots of different sites, and it is pretty robust. However, if it doesn't work for you, let us know, and we'll try to help.

In a word, yes. Obviously, all websites are different, but we can usually quickly integrate our tool into your site. We will usually integrate the tool into your site free of charge. If you are interested in this service, get in touch.

We have a number of advanced options you can set when creating a PDF. These are all passed in as parameters to the URL, but you don't have to remember the syntax. You can use our URL builder to create a specific set of options. The URL builder is accessed from your main account page.

Options:

• Owner Password - setting this will enable encryption of the PDF.
• User Password - setting this will require a password to be provided on PDF open.
• User restrictions - there are a number of things you can restrict a user from doing, if you've set an Owner Password. We implement Can Assemble, Can Change, Can Copy, Can Edit, Can Extract, Can Fill In Forms, Can Print, Can Print High Quality.
• Email Generated PDF - if you'd prefer the PDF link to e-mail the resulting PDF somewhere, you can use this option and provide the e-mail address.
• Margins - you can specify top, bottom, left and right margins for your PDF.
• Footer - you can select to put page numbers and the URL of the page you generate into a footer on each page.