Ask HN: Is PDF generation a real pain for developers? • Hacker News Board

Post by danielstudds » Thu, May 02, 2013, 9:57 AM UTC

knkella wrote: post #19

danielstudds wrote: post #9

I work in the DOCCM (Document Output for Customer Communications Management) space, which in a certain light is just generating PDFs (well, perhaps a bit more complex than that...). Enterprise deals in this space will have 6 or 7 zeros, so yes, there is a market for generating PDFs. There are already some cloud providers out there (like exari - it's been a while but I remember their stuff being pretty cool.) That's a…

Thanks for the feedback. We are going after the SF market, but there is already competition. As far as pricing model is concerned we would do that on the no of pages one generates. Do you think developers are not the right market? Can we offer it to developers in some form?

PDF generation is a complex business... you're not going to be all things to all people, you need to choose a particular niche (at least to start with) and make that work. I can see the value prop in report generation on SF. "PDF Generation for developers" is too broad: I don't think you can do it (because there are so many different types of of PDFs to generate) and I can't see the value prop (because it's going to cost you more to provide a generic PDF generation service than it will cost me to use an existing library.)

That said, there might be a market there for developers, but you'll need to identify a very particular challenge that devs have and provide a much better solution than what they can achieve with a library in a day.