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Loading CSS from a URL in Java with HttpClient

In this guide, we'll show you how to load CSS from a URL when converting HTML to PDF using Java and the HttpClient library.

When converting HTML to PDF, you might want to reference external CSS files to maintain consistent styling.

import java.net.http.*;
import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest.BodyPublishers;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse.BodyHandlers;
import java.time.Duration;

// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
String apiKey = "sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx";

HttpClient client = HttpClient.newBuilder()
    .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(10))
    .build();

HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
    .uri(URI.create("https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf"))
    .header("X-API-Key", apiKey)
    .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
    .POST(BodyPublishers.ofString("{\n" +
        "  \"source\": \"https://www.example.com\",\n" +
        "  \"css\": \"https://example.com/styles.css\"\n" +
        "}"))
    .build();

HttpResponse<byte[]> response = client.send(request, BodyHandlers.ofByteArray());

// Handle errors:
if (response.statusCode() >= 400) {
    throw new RuntimeException("Request failed with status code " + response.statusCode());
}

java.nio.file.Files.write(java.nio.file.Paths.get("result.pdf"), response.body());

System.out.println("The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf");

This allows you to apply external stylesheets to your PDFs.

For further details on the css 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.