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Quickstart

Normalize your first PDF in under 5 minutes using the PDFCanon API.

Prerequisites​

  • A PDFCanon account — sign up at app.pdfcanon.com
  • An API key from the API Keys section of the portal
  • curl or an HTTP client of your choice

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_.

Step 2 — Normalize a PDF​

curl -X POST https://api.pdfcanon.com/api/normalize \
  -H "X-Api-Key: pdfn_your_api_key_here" \
  -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.

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​

  • 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