101–110 of 125 posts
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!
Taking a quick look at https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/tools-and-api/ , I'm puzzled.... what distinguishes a "PDF Generator" from a "PDF Creator" from a "PDF Writer"? How would I know which one I want? Oh, looks like they're the exact same thing: a webpage-to-PDF service. Then there are a whole bunch of "PDF Converter" options, including "HTML > PDF", which seems to be yet another name for the same thing. For…
[deleted]
It's a tool for reading research papers (PDFs) together with your colleagues. You can read, annotate, comment etc.
Needless to say, it led me down quite deep into the PDF world and it.. was interesting.
Taking a quick look at https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/tools-and-api/ , I'm puzzled.... what distinguishes a "PDF Generator" from a "PDF Creator" from a "PDF Writer"? How would I know which one I want? Oh, looks like they're the exact same thing: a webpage-to-PDF service. Then there are a whole bunch of "PDF Converter" options, including "HTML > PDF", which seems to be yet another name for the same thing. For…
Of course the downside is as you've pointed out - it can be seen as distasteful and in some cases confusing to our users. We will review this on our side and see if it makes sense to remove some of those tools to reduce confusion.
However a good documentation you have there!
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.
Sometimes text is positioned absolute to the page border, sometimes relative to other elements, where moving a word shifts all following elements around. There can be multiple matrices involved for positioning text elements. Sometimes text elements are all positioned independently, sometimes by using newlines with custom size. Text elements can span multiple lines or words but sometimes each letter is a single text element where it is even hard to determine, which letters go together or if there's meant to be a space. Additionally fonts can be subsetted, where it's impossible to use other unused letters without knowing the original font. And than there can be OCR'ed PDF's, where an image of scanned text is overlayed on top of the real text. Oh and there can be clipping paths: Rectangles which erase all text below.
And each PDF-Producer creates a different PDF structure.
For reading, PDF's are awesome. For editing, PDF's are a nightmare.
Nice set of tools!! I recently launched a PDF-related project. https://www.scholars.io It's a tool for reading research papers (PDFs) together with your colleagues. You can read, annotate, comment etc. Needless to say, it led me down quite deep into the PDF world and it.. was interesting.
As far as I know, PDF/A is the only format that fits the first two specs. I know annotations are in the PDF specs but is it reasonable to think that annotations I make today will be readable - and updatable - in (e.g.,) 30 years?
I recently went down the PDF rabbit hole for a project. I had to use different OSS tools to do everything I wanted. I was able to access three from within nodejs without touching the disk: 1) Libreoffice CLI for converting doc/docx to PDF. It handled the formatting remarkably well. WARNING: you must have the fonts on the system doing the generating or it will substitute "similar" fonts! NPM: libreoffice-convert 2) NP…
Libreoffice only does a mediocre job of rendering Word documents. There are a number of cases where it really mangles things. An example would be some types of bulleted lists or indentation.
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…
There are at least 6 non-Chromium alternative that I can think of in a moment's notice, and also LGPL wkhtmltopdf.
>Office to PDF.... You have to hack together a headless OpenOffice to have it work at all, but it doesn't do a great job... Microsoft does not offer a service to do this, unfortunately.
Microsoft sorta does offer a service to do this. Sharepoint has a word to pdf action, and with some stitching you can make it into an API. There are also several commercial solution (e.g. Spire.NET) for this and also ways exist to mangle the OpenXML into HTML (of course losing some fidelity into the process).