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.
You only need an Acrobat Pro for that.* That's daily business for me, although not with invoices but printing data. * (becomes harder when the font is not embedded/existent as a subset, but Acrobat let's you choose another font, so no big deal.)
Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#22Not 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.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#23I am also dealing with some clients that are struggling with processing handwriting in their document, but I guess it will be a little far fetched.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#24Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#25Very 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…
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.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#26Not 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.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#27Not 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.
That's a great point. For folks that have strong privacy needs, we do have an on-premise product that provides the same functionality [1]. [1] https://pspdfkit.com/server/processor/
Sounds to me like an unnecessary extra expense for an unnecessary extra layer of abstraction. And there's a risk factor that comes with it: Say I make a nontrivial investment, like write a book that I'm planning on typesetting with this, or write a reporting infrastructure that creates automated reports or something. I'll make a huge up-front investment there that is tied to your API. Then I want to run this, while not touching it, for 10 years so it can earn a return on investment.
Then I come back to it 10 years later, because I'm writing the second edition of the book, or I want to change something about my reporting infrastructure. Has your company gone out of business in the meantime? Have you deprecated the product? Do you still support the API from 10 years ago? Does it still produce the same output for the same input? ...or do I need to take a huge write-off on all the work I've done on the typesetting my book or hooking up my reporting infrastructure?
In the open source world, I'd just make sure to bundle all the tools I'm using, including their sourcecode, in a docker container or something. In the "10 years later" scenario, I'll probably need to touch only the book's sourecode, or the reporting infrastructure's sourcecode, not the typesetting infrastructure. And if there's something I really really need, then I can go to the source and change it.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#28Have you written your own code from scratch?
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#29Very 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.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#30I've connected with several other customers of PSPDFKit over the years and they almost all have much more reasonable pricing.
Beware!