> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.pdfshift.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Varying responses

When calling the `POST /v3/convert/{type}` endpoint, PDFShift will return you a different set of response that depends on the parameters you provided.

<Note>This is important to take into consideration when developing your logic</Note>

## Default response

By default, PDFShift will return the raw binary document (either a PDF, JPEG, PNG or WEBP).

## `filename` parameter

But if you pass the `filename` parameter, **the result will be a JSON object** and the binary data will be stored on an S3 storage.

Here's a sample of the JSON response:

```json theme={null}
{
    "success": true,
    "url": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfshift/d/2/2019-05/99c456250a01448686d81752a3fb5beb/15466098-8368-49e1-ac33-ff4c3941a0df.pdf",
    "filesize": 259972,
    "duration": 1500,
    "response": {
        "duration": 2562,
        "status-code": 200
    },
    "executed": "2025-12-02T12:34:56.789Z",
    "pdf_pages": 5
}
```

<Note>The `pdf_pages` is obviously only present when converting to a PDF document</Note>

This is because when you pass `filename`, you indicate to PDFShift that you don't want to receive back the binary PDF, but you want to create a file and receive a pointer to that file, which is represented by the "url" parameter.

## `webhook` parameter

Finally, if you pass the `webhook` parameter, you ask PDFShift to convert the document and then send you the data not in response, but as a POST request toward your server (provided by the `webhook` value).

In this case, PDFShift will send a POST request to your server with the same data as for the `filename` parameter, such as :

```json theme={null}
{
    "success": true,
    "url": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfshift/d/2/2019-05/99c456250a01448686d81752a3fb5beb/15466098-8368-49e1-ac33-ff4c3941a0df.pdf",
    "filesize": 259972,
    "duration": 1500,
    "response": {
        "duration": 2562,
        "status-code": 200
    },
    "executed": "2025-12-02T12:34:56.789Z",
    "pdf_pages": 5
}
```

You can read more about the Webhook events at [Webhook events](/docs/webhook-events).