Quickstart

Normalize your first PDF in under 5 minutes using the PDFCanon API or one of the official SDKs.

Prerequisites

• A PDFCanon account — sign up at app.pdfcanon.com
• An API key from the API Keys section of the portal
• curl or one of the SDKs below

Step 1 — Get your API key

Navigate to app.pdfcanon.com → API Keys and create a new key. Copy the key value — it starts with pdfn_.

Set it in your environment so the SDKs can pick it up automatically:

export PDFCANON_API_KEY=pdfn_your_api_key_here

Step 2 — Normalize a PDF

cURL

curl -X POST https://api.pdfcanon.com/api/normalize \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $PDFCANON_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/pdf" \
  --data-binary @input.pdf \
  -o normalized.pdf

If normalization succeeds, normalized.pdf contains the canonical output and the response headers include the submission metadata.

.NET

dotnet add package PDFCanon

using PDFCanon;

using var client = new PDFCanonClient(); // reads PDFCANON_API_KEY

var response = await client.NormalizeAsync("input.pdf");
Console.WriteLine($"Status: {response.Status}");
Console.WriteLine($"Submission ID: {response.SubmissionId}");

if (response.Normalized?.Sha256 is { } sha256)
{
    var bytes = await client.GetArtifactAsync(sha256);
    await File.WriteAllBytesAsync("normalized.pdf", bytes);
}

Node.js

npm install @pdfcanon/sdk

import { PDFCanonClient } from '@pdfcanon/sdk';
import { readFileSync, writeFileSync } from 'node:fs';

const client = new PDFCanonClient(); // reads PDFCANON_API_KEY

const buffer = readFileSync('input.pdf');
const response = await client.normalize(buffer, 'input.pdf');

console.log('Status:', response.status);
console.log('Submission ID:', response.submissionId);

if (response.normalized?.sha256) {
  const pdf = await client.downloadArtifact(response.normalized.sha256);
  writeFileSync('normalized.pdf', pdf);
}

Python

pip install pdfcanon

from pdfcanon import PDFCanonClient

client = PDFCanonClient()  # reads PDFCANON_API_KEY

with open("input.pdf", "rb") as f:
    response = client.normalize(f, file_name="input.pdf")

print("Status:", response.status)
print("Submission ID:", response.submission_id)

if response.normalized:
    pdf_bytes = client.download_artifact(response.normalized.sha256)
    with open("normalized.pdf", "wb") as out:
        out.write(pdf_bytes)

Java

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.pdfcanon</groupId>
  <artifactId>pdfcanon-sdk</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

import com.pdfcanon.PDFCanonClient;
import com.pdfcanon.model.NormalizeResponse;
import java.nio.file.*;

PDFCanonClient client = new PDFCanonClient(); // reads PDFCANON_API_KEY

NormalizeResponse response = client.normalize(Path.of("input.pdf"));
System.out.println("Status: " + response.getStatus());
System.out.println("Submission ID: " + response.getSubmissionId());

if (response.getNormalized() != null) {
    byte[] bytes = client.getArtifact(response.getNormalized().getSha256());
    Files.write(Path.of("normalized.pdf"), bytes);
}

Go

go get github.com/pdfcanon/pdfcanon-go

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "os"

    "github.com/pdfcanon/pdfcanon-go"
)

func main() {
    client := pdfcanon.NewClient("") // reads PDFCANON_API_KEY

    f, err := os.Open("input.pdf")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer f.Close()

    resp, err := client.Normalize(context.Background(), f, "input.pdf", nil)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    fmt.Println("Status:", resp.Status)
    fmt.Println("Submission ID:", resp.SubmissionID)
}

Step 3 — Retrieve the submission record

curl https://api.pdfcanon.com/api/submissions/{submissionId} \
  -H "X-Api-Key: pdfn_your_api_key_here"

Step 4 — (Optional) Fetch the normalization report

curl https://api.pdfcanon.com/api/reports/{outputHash} \
  -H "X-Api-Key: pdfn_your_api_key_here"

Next steps

• Why normalize PDFs? — Background on what the pipeline actually does
• The normalization pipeline — All 11 stages, visualized
• Toolchain versioning — The stability contract behind every hash
• Authentication — Learn about API key scopes and rotation
• Normalizing PDFs — Deep dive into the normalization pipeline
• Webhooks — Receive async notifications when jobs complete
• SDKs — Use an official SDK in your language