What about an option to delete documents in less than 24 hours?
Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#22It says it's secure.
No privacy policy. Nothing except "we delete your PDFs after 24 hours".
No security guarantee.
No performance bond.
(Do I expect that for free? No. But I expect the documentation to be there.)
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#23Hi HN. I built PDF Otter to solve a headache my last company faced. We needed to fill in PDF contracts repeatedly and there was no service out there that did that, so we had to build something in-house. We couldn't use [hello/docu]sign because sending users there lowered our conversion rates. The PDF Otter API powers the PDF editor advertised on the homepage. The editor is simple but I think its better than similar s…
Adobe pro has this built in, or am I missing something...?
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#24Hi HN. I built PDF Otter to solve a headache my last company faced. We needed to fill in PDF contracts repeatedly and there was no service out there that did that, so we had to build something in-house. We couldn't use [hello/docu]sign because sending users there lowered our conversion rates. The PDF Otter API powers the PDF editor advertised on the homepage. The editor is simple but I think its better than similar s…
Any plans to allow inserting images (i.e. a signature)? Filling out PDFs is a huge pain for me and I'd love to replace it with this, but I need to insert handwritten signatures, not just text.
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#25I work at a company that has a pretty comprehensive suite of PDF templates we fill out, so if you want some feedback from someone who would have been a perfect customer 3 years ago:
The biggest thing that costs us time is schema validation. We ended up building a tool that rejects uploads if the text fields don't match, or if you forget to include a radio option, etc. It also has "recommended" fields which issue warnings if they are not implemented.
Radio options, checkboxes, and images (for signatures) would be a welcome addition that I didn't see in the editor.
The documentation / online demo doesn't make it clear how I would go from fields -> API access (because how do I name the fields?).
[append]
An API endpoint to get the unfilled PDF template would also be good, especially if bundled with a client library that handled the call to pdftk. Some of our documents are HIPAA and I don't want to deal with having the client data leave our machines.
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#26Hi HN. I built PDF Otter to solve a headache my last company faced. We needed to fill in PDF contracts repeatedly and there was no service out there that did that, so we had to build something in-house. We couldn't use [hello/docu]sign because sending users there lowered our conversion rates. The PDF Otter API powers the PDF editor advertised on the homepage. The editor is simple but I think its better than similar s…
Any plans to allow inserting images (i.e. a signature)? Filling out PDFs is a huge pain for me and I'd love to replace it with this, but I need to insert handwritten signatures, not just text.
Yes! I'll be adding a way to apply images to PDFs soon. Do you usually have an image of your signature handy on your computer or would you create one if the image feature was available? Another thought I had was maybe adding a "signature pad" where users can scribble their signature and I'd save it for them to use repeatedly. I'd love your thoughts on this.
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#27What about an option to delete documents in less than 24 hours?
Providing more flexibilty with deleting documents is on my roadmap but I can't get to it today. If there's a sensitive document you want deleted now, please reach out to me at mariusz [at] pdfotter [dot] com and I'll manually delete it.
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any plans to allow inserting images (i.e. a signature)? Filling out PDFs is a huge pain for me and I'd love to replace it with this, but I need to insert handwritten signatures, not just text.
Yes! I'll be adding a way to apply images to PDFs soon. Do you usually have an image of your signature handy on your computer or would you create one if the image feature was available? Another thought I had was maybe adding a "signature pad" where users can scribble their signature and I'd save it for them to use repeatedly. I'd love your thoughts on this.
I have an photo of a handwritten signature that I use in Adobe. They do a pretty good job of extracting the signature contours from the photo. I've also seen a (much crappier) version of this on my mobile banking app, for processing photos of checks. They basically just blow up the contrast until only the blackest part of the image remains. It looks awful, but it might be a good place to iterate from. If you implement something more sophisticated, it definitely makes sense to save it on the backend so you don't have to redo the (possibly expensive/slow) image processing operation every time.
A signature pad could work too; I think HelloSign has something like that. But it's not a great solution if you don't have a tablet, since it's really hard to draw a proper signature with a mouse. Honestly, even just adding a "handwriting font" might be good enough for most circumstances. Most of the document signing services provide this, and it could be implemented very quickly with minimal changes to your API.
If I were you, I would probably start with a handwriting font, and add hand-drawn signature support afterward. I would also look into what the law says about this sort of thing. I know that services like HelloSign require that you authorize them to use your signature in a legally-binding manner. But I don't know if that regulation would apply to your service, since your service is a lot more bare-bones. For example, you don't store the PDFs indefinitely, and you don't coordinate any sort of multi-party signature operation; that all happens out-of-band. So you might be in the clear.
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#29The forms extensions in PDF are a problem in FOSS software. I'm wondering if this tool does, or can export the downloaded (edited) PDF as PDF/A-2 (or PDF/A-3) conforming? Because a problem is having PDFs you've filled out that aren't archival documents; and further to that a nice option would be support for embedded digital signatures.
Thanks for the ideas! The downloaded PDFs are not in a PDF/A format. I understand the need for a feature like this - I have used some government services that only allow submitted PDFs in archivable format. The commercial PDF->PDF/A libraries I came across are pretty pricey. Do you know of any open source alternatives?
PDFBox from Apache has this: https://pdfbox.apache.org/1.8/cookbook/pdfacreation.html
Re: Show HN: PDF Otter – Fill in PDFs Online and API
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! I'll be adding a way to apply images to PDFs soon. Do you usually have an image of your signature handy on your computer or would you create one if the image feature was available? Another thought I had was maybe adding a "signature pad" where users can scribble their signature and I'd save it for them to use repeatedly. I'd love your thoughts on this.
I have an photo of a handwritten signature that I use in Adobe. They do a pretty good job of extracting the signature contours from the photo. I've also seen a (much crappier) version of this on my mobile banking app, for processing photos of checks. They basically just blow up the contrast until only the blackest part of the image remains. It looks awful, but it might be a good place to iterate from. If you implemen…
Thanks for all this great info. We do have a font option called 'Dancing Script' available now which can make your text look like a signature. I'll do some more research on e-signatures, though. I assume there's more to it than just changing your text's font.