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Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

snazzypdf.com

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Re: Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

#11

Post by patafemma »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Neat but as others are saying this is for a technical audience and there is a lot of other options for this. I could see some devs opting to use an open source software version and electing to host with your cloud hosting when devs do not want to bother keeping it securely hosted. Small market though. Better to create a bunch of freemium sites to help normies do things with pdfs like convert them to docx or other ima…

Thank you for the feedback! I agree, the niche seems pretty small. But I think there are not so many other options for this use case. At least I feel that creating a template and fitting your data into it is a different use case than throwing an arbitrary JSON against an API and getting a PDF document out straight away.

Open sourcing the project is not something that I have decided against. Maybe it could drive more adoption. I've found Chrome to be the best tool for PDF creation in this use case, so the API is actually running a pool of Chrome instances that are used for the rendering. This makes self-hosting slightly more complicated.

Re: Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

#12

Post by patafemma »

xupybd wrote: post #4

I think this is great but you might need to think about your point of difference. I suspect you have a product here but it might need some refining. I asked Claude to create me something to do this. It worked first go. import json from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Table, TableStyle, Paragraph from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet from reportlab…

Thanks for the feedback! You're absolutely right: simple cases like rendering lists, tables or key-value pairs are straightforward and can be done with many different tools without much effort. But the devil is in the details.

Where it gets tricky is handling more complex data structures: deeply nested objects and arrays, different date formats, varying element types and adapting the layout based on the structure. SnazzyPDF's layout engine automates those decisions. The configuration options are still limited but that's what I'm focusing on improving next.

Re: Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

#13

Post by xupybd »

rovr138 wrote: post #7
xupybd wrote: post #4

I think this is great but you might need to think about your point of difference. I suspect you have a product here but it might need some refining. I asked Claude to create me something to do this. It worked first go. import json from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Table, TableStyle, Paragraph from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet from reportlab…

Not really. The code, as is, doesn't run. `data` isn't defined. It missed loading the json into it. Edit here, I've been testing some models today. It's a great solution, easy to fix. I like the package it chose. My head is simply on evaluating things and code. Criticizing the model and output, not directed at you.

It ran for me?

Re: Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

#14

Post by xupybd »

xupybd wrote: post #13
rovr138 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The code, as is, doesn't run. `data` isn't defined. It missed loading the json into it. Edit here, I've been testing some models today. It's a great solution, easy to fix. I like the package it chose. My head is simply on evaluating things and code. Criticizing the model and output, not directed at you.

It ran for me?

Admittedly I didn't look at the code but that was the point. To see how little effort I could put in to get a pdf from my JSON. I suspect tons of bugs but it worked for my test.

Re: Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

#16

Post by mstijak »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #15

Is there any agpl compatible Python library or a product that creates PDF from json like this but has a wyswig PDF layout editor, like an invoice format builder ?

CxReports is a commercial product that lets you create PDFs from JSON using a WYSIWYG editor, perfect for building invoices. It can be hosted on-premise with Docker and has a Python client library. There’s a free tier allowing 500 PDFs/year.

https://cx-reports.com/

https://cx-reports.com/templates/invoices

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