Automation

Why Automate Report Generation? Every business generates reports: sales summaries, analytics dashboards, client deliverables, compliance documents. Doing this manually means hours of copy-pasting data into templates, adjusting formatting, and exporting PDFs. With the ToolCenter HTML-to-PDF API, you can turn any HTML template into a polished PDF in a single API call. Feed it data, get a report. The Architecture The workflow is straightforward: Fetch your data — Database query, API call, or spreadsheet Render HTML template — Inject data into an HTML template Convert to PDF — Send the HTML to ToolCenter Deliver — Email, upload to S3, or serve to users Step 1: Design Your Report Template Create a professional HTML report template: ...

Why Social Media Cards Matter When someone shares your link on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, the platform fetches your Open Graph (OG) metadata and renders a preview card. A well-designed card can increase click-through rates by 2-3x compared to a plain text link. The problem? Manually creating unique OG images for every page is tedious. If you have hundreds of blog posts, product pages, or landing pages, you need automation. ...

Cookie consent banners are the bane of automated screenshots. You set up a beautiful monitoring pipeline, and every screenshot has a giant popup covering half the page. In this guide, we will explore multiple techniques to block, hide, or dismiss cookie banners in automated screenshots. Why Cookie Banners Are a Problem Since GDPR and similar privacy regulations, nearly every website displays a cookie consent banner on first visit. For automated screenshot tools, every visit is a first visit because there are no stored cookies. This means: ...

Visual regression testing is a quality assurance technique that compares screenshots of your application over time to detect unintended visual changes. Instead of manually checking every page after each deployment, you can automate the entire process with a screenshot API. In this guide, we will walk through building a visual regression testing pipeline using the ToolCenter Screenshot API. What Is Visual Regression Testing? Visual regression testing captures screenshots of your web pages and compares them pixel-by-pixel against a baseline. When differences are detected, the test flags potential issues for review. ...

Generating invoices manually is a time sink. Whether you are running a SaaS, freelancing, or managing an e-commerce platform, automating invoice generation saves hours every month and eliminates human error. The best approach? Convert HTML templates to PDF using an API. In this guide, you will learn how to automate invoice generation by designing invoices in HTML and CSS, then converting them to pixel-perfect PDFs programmatically. Why HTML to PDF for Invoices? There are many ways to generate PDFs — libraries like ReportLab (Python), jsPDF (JavaScript), or wkhtmltopdf. But HTML-to-PDF has clear advantages: ...

Your website just broke and nobody noticed for three hours. A CSS update pushed to production shifted the checkout button off-screen, and conversions dropped to zero. If only you had automated screenshot monitoring in place, you would have caught it in minutes. In this guide, you will learn how to build a website monitoring system using automated screenshots that detects visual changes, layout issues, and downtime — with practical code you can deploy today. ...