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

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

#1

Post by arkgil »

Hi HN,

Arek here. We’re super excited to officially launch PSPDFKit API [1].

PSPDFKit API is a collection of HTTP APIs that enable you to convert, generate, and edit documents without running any service on your infrastructure.

What differentiates our API from others is that you can chain together multiple “actions” as part of a single API request. For example, you can convert, OCR, watermark, edit, and flatten a document — all in one call.

Available actions [2]:

- PDF Generator

- PDF Converter

- Image Converter

- OCR

- Watermark

- Merge

- Split

- Duplicate

- Delete

- Flatten

Our documentation includes sample code for JavaScript [3], Python [4], Java [5], C# [6], PHP [7], and the command line. We also have a Postman collection [8].

Let us know what you think or if you have any questions.

[1] https://pspdfkit.com/api/

[2] https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/tools-and-api/

[3] https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/javascript/

[4] https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/python/

[5] https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/java/

[6] https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/csharp/

[7] https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/php/

[8] https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/getting-started/postm...

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

#4

Post by lgvld »

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 API calls and document processing with your product?)

But it’s nice you released SDK in several common languages.

Good luck!

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

#5

Post by lgvld »

koinexpert wrote: post #2

Very cool! Consider perhaps adding one more call, one to remove passwords. Not brute force, although that would be cool too, but just one that let's you specify the password and it makes the pdf no longer require a password.

Cool idea, yep. ;-)

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

#8

Post by fullyforged »

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…

Thanks! This is Claudio, PSPDFKit's CTO.

At this point in time the price is per generated document - irrespectively of how complicated the operation is.

Because you can combine operations in one http call, you're incentivised to do that as opposed to perform separate calls which increase the possibility of errors and cost for all sides.

Happily taking feedback though - your comment around hard-cap is definitely sound, for example.

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

#9

Post by fullyforged »

kareemm wrote: post #6

Is this used for creating pdfs from scratch (a docraptor alternative)? Or filling out pdfs programmatically (a docspring alternative)?

You can create a PDF from scratch starting from HTML - see https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/developer-guides/pdf-.... Note that HTML generation has a few nice quality of life additions around headers/footers, logos and conversion of HTML forms to PDF forms, which are things that you don't normally get with the print to PDF workflow you would normally build from scratch.

Filling out forms is not supported, but I'll take a note. The engine can do it, but we haven't got it exposed via the API.

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