Which rendering engine are you using in the backend?
The metadata on an output PDF I tested says Skia (though I guess that could be being wrapped by another library)
Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
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Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#12Which rendering engine are you using in the backend?
We're based on PDFium, but there's a lot more going on than just that - see https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2019/contributing-to-pdfium/ for an overview.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#13I recently discovered that search-replacing text in a PDF without changing the layout is much harder than I thought it would be (a customer forgot to change their billing address, and now that the invoice is finalized, Stripe won't let me edit anything, so down the PDF-editing rabbithole I went). I would love it if I could just use an API for this.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#14Very nice and useful product!
Question: do you have or plan to support PDF signatures? This may be then useful for us[1], we issue qualified certificates and eIDAS-compliant legal qualified electronic signatures which often need to then be embedded into PDFs.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#15Very nice and useful product! Question: do you have or plan to support PDF signatures? This may be then useful for us[1], we issue qualified certificates and eIDAS-compliant legal qualified electronic signatures which often need to then be embedded into PDFs. [1]: https://www.zealid.com/en/
Signing is something we'd like to explore, we often hear from folks who'd want to simplify their signing workflows. Thanks for the feedback!
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#16I recently discovered that search-replacing text in a PDF without changing the layout is much harder than I thought it would be (a customer forgot to change their billing address, and now that the invoice is finalized, Stripe won't let me edit anything, so down the PDF-editing rabbithole I went). I would love it if I could just use an API for this.
You only need an Acrobat Pro for that.* That's daily business for me, although not with invoices but printing data.
* (becomes harder when the font is not embedded/existent as a subset, but Acrobat let's you choose another font, so no big deal.)
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#17Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#18Very useful product, congratulations. ;-) Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no upper bound, depending on my users behavior. For ~750 € you can only process 1k documents during the month... hard-capped? The price schemes seem to target entreprise but entreprises usually have bigger volumes than that. (But maybe I confuse…
For higher volume, but simpler operations (merge, watermark, encrypt/decrypt, etc.) you can try https://www.pdfblocks.com/api. You get 10K docs processed for $29/mo, and 1M for $99/mo. We don't have conversion, OCR, generation, or chained operations though.
Source: I work at PDF Blocks
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#19Not a good usecase for an online API. To the extent that those PDFs could include sensitive information, there's a huge security/privacy headache there, with no real benefit when compared to performing these functions offline. It also seems to me a lot more expensive than alternative ways of doing the same thing.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#20Not a good usecase for an online API. To the extent that those PDFs could include sensitive information, there's a huge security/privacy headache there, with no real benefit when compared to performing these functions offline. It also seems to me a lot more expensive than alternative ways of doing the same thing.
Would work if you want to publish the pdf anyway.