Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 136 posts

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#31

Post by mkl »

williamstein wrote: post #28
spankalee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or open sourcing it? This seems like one of those complex-enough areas that having multiple groups and companies contribute to a common good could really pay off for everyone.

I agree. I would definitely love to integrate (and improve) this as part of my SAAS product, and I would spend way more than $400/year in effort on it. However, I can't possibly use or buy this as is, because it isn't open source. For comparison, my company pays for the CodeMirror "moral license"...

Pdf.js Express is US$375/month, or US$4500/year.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#32

Post by bdcravens »

detaro wrote: post #26
robocop2018 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an extension of pdf.js, not a fork.

The parent didn't ask if it was a fork or not.

The point being that this is an extension, and contributing back to that dependency is orthogonal.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#33

Post by transitivebs »

mkl wrote: post #31
williamstein wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I would definitely love to integrate (and improve) this as part of my SAAS product, and I would spend way more than $400/year in effort on it. However, I can't possibly use or buy this as is, because it isn't open source. For comparison, my company pays for the CodeMirror "moral license"...

Pdf.js Express is US$375/ month , or US$4500/year.

No, it's $440 / month if you look at the actual pay-per-month option.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#34

Post by tyingq »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #12

This reminds me of the people who tried to sell Blender a couple of years ago [0]. [0] https://www.blendernation.com/2009/06/11/3dmagix-re-branding...

This appears to have significant amounts of functionality that the open source pdf.js does not.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#35

Post by detaro »

bdcravens wrote: post #32
detaro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent didn't ask if it was a fork or not.

The point being that this is an extension, and contributing back to that dependency is orthogonal.

If they contribute back was the question.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#36

Post by eob »

akdarrah wrote: post #13

Hi Nick, Your product looks pretty awesome. It's super polished for your initial launch! Congrats! I'm curious how long it took to build the product and how large your team is? Do you have some initial customers? I'm building a similar paid Javascript Library business ( https://www.dropkiq.com/ ). I would love to connect if you want to share some ideas? Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested: adam@dropki…

Just wanted to say that both Dropkiq and website to market it look fantastic. Really nice work.

If you're ever interested in licensing a version to work with custom grammars (not liquid), I'd be interested! (email: ted AT instabase.com)

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#37

Post by molsongolden »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #19
2pointsomone wrote: post #16

I have a startup and we are highly reliant on PDF rendering in our application. But here's the thing, Nik: your pricing model doesn't make sense to me. In general, most PDF SDK models don't make sense. I have searched a lot over the years, and am left consistently disappointed. You charge the same amount to large commercial customers as you do to small startups, who are trying to save every penny. Even though I reall…

I want to say there was something that reached pretty high on the HN front page a few days ago that discussed SaaS pricing models and they made this exact same point! Aligning incentives between you and the customer just makes sense, as your comment clearly demonstrates!

Aligned incentives (we help you grow and succeed, we share the reward) has also come up in interviews and discussions as one of Stripe's greatest strengths.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#38

Post by niknikson »

skratlo wrote: post #9

Does not support XFA forms

Yes, that's correct. It's not supported by PDF.js [1]. But the good news is that it looks like Adobe is finally moving away from their proprietary XFA format, with the introduction of their forms extension.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/2373

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#39

Post by niknikson »

mmckelvy wrote: post #10

RE: the "Extract & parse content" feature, does this mean you can parse and extract data from PDF documents like bank statements or invoices?

We can extract text and form data -- we'll try to get some documentation around that in the next week or so.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#40

Post by niknikson »

phonon wrote: post #11

The form fill demo only prints a bitmap. Is that intentional? The quality is completely unacceptable.

Yes, unfortunately the printing is done with a bitmap because of the lack of browser APIs to print scalable canvas content. It looks like our default print quality is a bit on the low side though, so we'll probably change that. You can use the API to increase the quality as well https://pdfjs.express/api/WebViewerInstance.html#setPrintQua..., for example instance.setPrintQuality(2).
Post reply on HN