Universal Web Printer

HTML to PDF/Image & Screenshot - A powerful web rendering Actor based on Crawlee and Playwright

🎯 Features

• Multi-Format Output: PDF, PNG, JPEG, WebP
• Flexible Input: URLs or raw HTML strings
• Advanced View Modes:
  • viewport - Capture exactly what you see
  • full-page - Smart Scroll technology to capture lazy-loaded content perfectly
  • selector - Extract specific DOM elements as vector-rich PDFs or images
  • readability - Distraction-free reading mode (Mozilla Readability integration)
• Page Manipulation:
  • Remove unwanted elements (ads, cookie banners)
  • Click buttons ("Load More", "I Agree")
  • Inject custom CSS
  • Hide fixed sticky elements
• Security & Branding:
  • PDF Encryption: Password protect your documents (RC4 128-bit)
  • Watermarking: Add text or image watermarks with custom positioning, royalty-free tiling, and transparency
• Enterprise-Ready: Proxy support, automatic retries, fingerprint evasion, and PDF merging

🚀 Quick Start

URL to PDF

{
  "sourceType": "url",
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://example.com" }],
  "outputFormat": "pdf",
  "viewMode": "viewport"
}

HTML to Image

{
  "sourceType": "html",
  "htmlContent": "<h1>Hello World</h1><p>This is a test.</p>",
  "baseUrl": "https://example.com",
  "outputFormat": "png",
  "viewportWidth": 1200,
  "viewportHeight": 630
}

Full Page Screenshot

{
  "sourceType": "url",
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com" }],
  "outputFormat": "png",
  "viewMode": "full-page",
  "smartScroll": true,
  "hideFixedElements": true
}

Element Extraction

{
  "sourceType": "url",
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://example.com" }],
  "outputFormat": "pdf",
  "viewMode": "selector",
  "targetSelector": ".invoice-container"
}

📋 Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
sourceType	url | html	url	Input source type
startUrls	array	-	URLs to render
htmlContent	string	-	Raw HTML to render
baseUrl	string	-	Base URL for relative paths
outputFormat	pdf | png | jpeg | webp	pdf	Output file format
viewMode	viewport | full-page | selector | readability	viewport	Capture mode
targetSelector	string	-	CSS selector for element extraction
viewportWidth	integer	1920	Browser width
viewportHeight	integer	1080	Browser height
scaleFactor	integer	2	Device Scale Factor (DPR)
paperFormat	A4 | A3 | Letter | Legal | Tabloid	A4	PDF paper size
printBackground	boolean	true	Include backgrounds in PDF
smartScroll	boolean	true	Enable lazy-load triggering
scrollDelay	integer	500	Wait time after scroll (ms)
waitForSelector	string	-	Wait for element before capture
removeSelectors	array	[]	Elements to remove
clickSelectors	array	[]	Elements to click
hideFixedElements	boolean	true	Hide sticky navbars
customCss	string	-	Custom CSS to inject
mergePdfs	boolean	false	Merge all PDFs into one
pdfPassword	string	-	PDF encryption user/owner password
imageQuality	integer	80	Image compression (1-100)
watermark	object	-	Watermark configuration (see below)

💧 Watermark Configuration

The watermark object supports the following properties:

Property	Type	Default	Description
type	text | image	-	Watermark type
text	string	-	Text content (for text type)
imageUrl	string (url)	-	Image URL (for image type)
opacity	number (0-1)	-	Opacity level
color	string	-	Text color (e.g. red, #ff0000, rgba(...))
size	number	-	Font size (text) or scale % (image)
rotation	number	-	Rotation in degrees
position	enum	-	center, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right, tile

📤 Output

Results are saved to Key-Value Store and metadata to Dataset:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "sourceType": "url",
  "outputFormat": "pdf",
  "viewMode": "viewport",
  "fileName": "example_com_2025-12-10T06-30-00-000Z.pdf",
  "fileUrl": "example_com_2025-12-10T06-30-00-000Z.pdf",
  "fileSize": 123456,
  "pageCount": 2,
  "capturedAt": "2025-12-10T06:30:00.000Z"
}

🍳 Recipes

Recipe 1: Invoice Generation

{
  "sourceType": "html",
  "htmlContent": "<html>...invoice template...</html>",
  "baseUrl": "https://yourdomain.com/assets/",
  "outputFormat": "pdf",
  "paperFormat": "A4",
  "printBackground": true
}

Recipe 2: News Archiving (Ad-Free)

{
  "sourceType": "url",
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://news-site.com/article" }],
  "outputFormat": "pdf",
  "viewMode": "full-page",
  "removeSelectors": ["#cookie-banner", ".ad-container", ".newsletter-popup"],
  "hideFixedElements": true
}

Recipe 3: Social Media Card Generator

{
  "sourceType": "html",
  "htmlContent": "<div style='width:1200px;height:630px;background:linear-gradient(135deg,#667eea,#764ba2);padding:40px;color:white;'><h1>My Article Title</h1></div>",
  "outputFormat": "png",
  "viewportWidth": 1200,
  "viewportHeight": 630
}

Recipe 4: Secure Document with Watermark

{
  "sourceType": "url",
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://example.com/contract" }],
  "outputFormat": "pdf",
  "watermark": {
    "type": "text",
    "text": "CONFIDENTIAL",
    "opacity": 0.3,
    "rotation": -45,
    "position": "center",
    "color": "rgb(255, 0, 0)",
    "size": 50
  },
  "pdfPassword": "secure-password-123"
}

Recipe 5: Branded Image with Logo Tile

{
  "sourceType": "url",
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://example.com" }],
  "outputFormat": "png",
  "watermark": {
    "type": "image",
    "imageUrl": "https://example.com/logo.png",
    "opacity": 0.2,
    "size": 15,
    "position": "tile"
  }
}

---

💳 Pricing

This Actor uses pay per event — you pay for the operations you actually use, not for compute time. A plain URL-to-PDF job only triggers Render.

Event	Price	When it fires
Render	$0.0070	Once per page rendered to PDF/PNG/JPEG/WebP
Watermark	$0.0020	Only if you enable watermarking
PDF encryption	$0.0030	Only if you set a password
PDF merge	$0.0100	Once per merged output document
Actor start	$0.00005	Once per run

What the free plan gets you: Apify's free plan includes $5 of platform credit every month, which is about 710 plain renders per month at no cost. 1,000 renders cost $7; adding watermarks to all of them adds $2.

You are never charged for pages that fail to render. Set Max total charge on the run to cap spend.

---

🤖 Use with AI agents

This Actor is callable as a tool by any MCP-capable agent — Claude, Cursor, VS Code — or by your own code, with no wrapper and nothing extra to deploy.

Connect over MCP

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=autofacts/universal-web-printer

In a client that reads an mcpServers configuration block:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=autofacts/universal-web-printer",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

The agent reads this Actor's parameters and their descriptions straight from the input schema, and the hosted server infers the result field types from the dataset schema — so a model knows what to send and what comes back before it ever calls anything.

Or call the API directly

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/autofacts~universal-web-printer/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"startUrls": [{"url": "https://apify.com/store"}]}'

The response body is the dataset records described above.

🧰 Other Actors by autofacts

Apify only auto-recommends Actors in the same category, so here are the ones that actually pair with this scraper:

Actor	What it's for
Schema Markup Scraper & SEO Auditor	Extract structured data and run a 0–100 SEO audit on the same URL
YouTube Subtitle & Transcript Scraper	Captions as JSON, SRT, VTT or LLM-ready text
Shopify Scraper	Product, variant and collection data from any Shopify store

All of them: apify.com/autofacts