Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 125 posts

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

#21
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.

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.)

LibreOffice Draw edits PDFs pretty well.

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

#22
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.

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/

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

#23
Do you have any plan in your roadmap to support different languages in the OCR feature? I'm specifically interested in recognize and processing PDF files written in Japanese and Korean.

I 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

#25
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.

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

#26
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.

Very valid concern around privacy. We don't store the documents (see https://pspdfkit.com/api/privacy/), but for people that have sensitive documents to process, we offer an on-prem product, see https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/deployment-options/. You can run it in your own infra and it doesn't report any telemetry to us, so information remains completely private.

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

#27
post #22
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.

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/

So what exactly does that leave? A wrapper that you've created around weasyprint, pandoc, latex, ghostscript, imagemagick, and stuff like that?

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

#29
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.

With an annual plan of 10,000 documents per month, we charge $0.04 per document. If you try it out, I'd love to hear your feedback on the quality of OCR!

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

#30
Just an FYI but PSPDFKit has a very predatory sales model. Our organization received pricing that was generally very high and we pushed back on it because we were a startup and it was outside of our budget.

I've connected with several other customers of PSPDFKit over the years and they almost all have much more reasonable pricing.

Beware!

Post reply on HN