Converting a Page to a PDF File

You can render any page as a PDF by adding the renderAs attribute to the <apex:page> component, and specifying “pdf” as the rendering service. For example:

<apex:page renderAs="pdf">

Visualforce pages rendered as PDFs will either display in the browser or download as a PDF file, depending on your browser settings.

In the previous tutorial, you used a Visualforce page to change the name of a company. Suppose you wanted to generate an announcement of the new name as a PDF. The following example produces such a page, along with the current date and time.

<apex:page standardController="Account" renderAs="pdf" applyBodyTag="false">
    <head>
        <style> 
            body { font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'; }
            .companyName { font: bold 30px; color: red; }  
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <center>
        <h1>New Account Name!</h1>
     
        <apex:panelGrid columns="1" width="100%">
            <apex:outputText value="{!account.Name}" styleClass="companyName"/>
            <apex:outputText value="{!NOW()}"></apex:outputText>
        </apex:panelGrid>
        </center>
    </body>
</apex:page>

Things to note about the page:

<style> is CSS markup, not Visualforce markup. It defines the font family used for the entire page, as well as a particular style for the company name.
Some of the output text is contained in an <apex:panelGrid> component. A panel grid renders as an HTML table. Each component found in the body of the <apex:panelGrid> component is placed into a corresponding cell in the first row until the number of columns is reached. As there is only a single cell, each output text is displayed in a separate row.

A Visualforce page rendered as a PDF

Always verify the format of your rendered page before deploying it.

See Also