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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

#81

Post by eastendguy »

danielrhodes wrote: post #75
amluto wrote: post #65

I find this utterly bizarre. Once upon a time, if you wanted to left pad a string, you would just do it. A while later, people discovered that you could use a library. (I’m joking a bit here, but libraries are genuinely useful.). With a library, you get to pick from various schemes and schedules for updating the library, but you have a degree of control. But now apparently you’re supposed to use a web API and depend…

This really does not resonate at all, and I have the scars to prove it. I used to work on a browser-based document management system, and I would have used (or at least tried) all of these APIs without hesitation. PDFs are a pain and the mish mash of poor functioning tools that exist provides a constant headache. 1) OCR'ing of a PDF is difficult. The only good service is Google, but requires that you break it into pa…

> 1) OCR'ing of a PDF is difficult. The only good service is Google

OCRspace is OK, too, and easier to use. You can just send the PDF. It is free for PDFs with 3 or less pages.

> 2) People want searchable OCR'd PDFs where you can highlight the text, even when it's a bitmap underneath.

OCRspace can also create searchable PDFs: https://ocr.space/searchablepdf

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#82

Post by danielrhodes »

m12k wrote: post #13

I 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.

This isn't easy because PDFs are PostScript, so text is laid out absolutely. You can make very small changes but a larger change requiring a reflow of the text would break things. In some cases it is possible to convert the PDF to a Word document, make edits, and then save it back to a PDF.

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#83

Post by citruscomputing »

m12k wrote: post #13

I 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.

What I used for this exact problem was pdftk's `stamp` option, with a stamp pdf that was just a white rectangle with text on it, as a sibling commenter mentioned. Worked for several hundred documents!

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#85

Post by jfk13 »

danielrhodes wrote: post #75
amluto wrote: post #65

I find this utterly bizarre. Once upon a time, if you wanted to left pad a string, you would just do it. A while later, people discovered that you could use a library. (I’m joking a bit here, but libraries are genuinely useful.). With a library, you get to pick from various schemes and schedules for updating the library, but you have a degree of control. But now apparently you’re supposed to use a web API and depend…

This really does not resonate at all, and I have the scars to prove it. I used to work on a browser-based document management system, and I would have used (or at least tried) all of these APIs without hesitation. PDFs are a pain and the mish mash of poor functioning tools that exist provides a constant headache. 1) OCR'ing of a PDF is difficult. The only good service is Google, but requires that you break it into pa…

I agree many of these things are a pain. This often reflects a workflow that is approaching things from entirely the wrong direction. ("If I wanted to go there, I wouldn't start from here.")

E.g. instead of trying to OCR a PDF, go back to the source document or database or whatever from which the PDF was generated. (Yes, I know that's not always an option. But it should be the first avenue to explore. We should push back against people who send around PDFs as though they were an all-purpose interchange format for textual or structured data.)

I'm a bit puzzled by (3), though:

> Office to PDF ... it's not easy ... when people see their PDF looks very different than what they saw on Word, they get upset

To get a PDF that looks the same as the Word document, just tell them to use the Print to PDF driver from right there within Word.

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#86

Post by ankrgyl »

danielrhodes wrote: post #75
amluto wrote: post #65

I find this utterly bizarre. Once upon a time, if you wanted to left pad a string, you would just do it. A while later, people discovered that you could use a library. (I’m joking a bit here, but libraries are genuinely useful.). With a library, you get to pick from various schemes and schedules for updating the library, but you have a degree of control. But now apparently you’re supposed to use a web API and depend…

This really does not resonate at all, and I have the scars to prove it. I used to work on a browser-based document management system, and I would have used (or at least tried) all of these APIs without hesitation. PDFs are a pain and the mish mash of poor functioning tools that exist provides a constant headache. 1) OCR'ing of a PDF is difficult. The only good service is Google, but requires that you break it into pa…

I'll just throw my hat in the ring and mention that at Impira, we are one of those startups wholly dedicated to (4). We happen to use Google's OCR engine (1) under the hood (for raw OCR), and what you said resonates for sure: there's a lot of engineering work required to make it work performantly and generally (happy to chat about this with anyone who is interested).

Feel free to take Impira for a spin (https://www.impira.com) if you need to accurately extract data from PDF documents. Would love feedback from anyone who tries it out. [Disclaimer: I am the CEO/Founder of Impira].

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#87

Post by chadash »

gyulai wrote: post #19

Not 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.

> with no real benefit when compared to performing these functions offline

Most organizations these days are developing in the cloud. I assume you don't mean "offline" but rather performing these functions yourself.

I've tried, but it's a huge pain in the butt. PDFs are very quirky. Things work well 95% of the time and the 5% takes a lot of time to figure out.

When trying to do this myself in an app deployed to AWS, I've had many issues with getting all characters in different languages to work. Every few months, some new thing in a PDF file throws an error and the file won't generate. You get weird file size errors. And the quality of PDF generation varies a lot by language. I'd much rather have an API that I can just call from any of my code if it JUST WORKS.

Now, their pricing is strange and might be a dealbreaker for me. I'd like to see an option to pay per transaction with no cap without having to negotiate with their sales team.

> there's a huge security/privacy headache there

eh, maybe. Some use cases don't require privacy. In my case, I'm mostly assembling PDFs from various sources with my company's documents. No, I don't want a vendor that is going to post my documents to twitter, but I can sleep at night if I have some kind of assurance that they don't use or sell my data.

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#88

Post by jcuenod »

danielrhodes wrote: post #75
amluto wrote: post #65

I find this utterly bizarre. Once upon a time, if you wanted to left pad a string, you would just do it. A while later, people discovered that you could use a library. (I’m joking a bit here, but libraries are genuinely useful.). With a library, you get to pick from various schemes and schedules for updating the library, but you have a degree of control. But now apparently you’re supposed to use a web API and depend…

This really does not resonate at all, and I have the scars to prove it. I used to work on a browser-based document management system, and I would have used (or at least tried) all of these APIs without hesitation. PDFs are a pain and the mish mash of poor functioning tools that exist provides a constant headache. 1) OCR'ing of a PDF is difficult. The only good service is Google, but requires that you break it into pa…

I'm a very happy user of OCRmyPDF: https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF/

Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

#89

Post by saradhi »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #25
lgvld wrote: post #4

Very 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…

Wow so if I’m reading this they charge about $1 USD per “document”? I’ve been looking for an easy OCR solution considering I have about 10,000 one-page documents a month (invoices). For comparison, Amazon textract is ~$0.05/pg for key-value pairs, but it involves more programming to set up.

Shameless Plug: Want to try at 0.025/page on the UI? We can help you.
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