Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by wolverine876 » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

danielrhodes wrote: post #119

wolverine876 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the GP's and your differing experiences, I wonder in which circumstances it works and in which it doesn't.

In most cases it is adequate. But there are a couple factors to consider: 1) OpenXML is an open standard and like HTML it is interpreted and rendered, much like a browser. MS Word is obviously the reference here. But in certain cases, you will see differences when using other renderers. If you wrote the document in Word and then view it in LibreOffice or wherever, those differences are going to seem pretty glaring. I…

Thank you!

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

#122

Post by wolverine876 » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

gettalong wrote: post #120

wolverine876 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, I wonder if you can answer a question: I want my books in an electronic format, that will be usable for the rest of my life or longer, and which preservers annotations. 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?

Yes, that is quite reasonable. The simple text annotations are quite easy to work with when using a PDF library and the standard tries to be backwards compatible where sensible. The PDF 2.0 standard removed some parts of PDF 1.7, like the proprietary XFA forms. But most things stayed in PDF 2.0 and one can expect that those annotations will also be available in future iterations of the PDF specification. And generall…

Thank you.

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

#123

Post by amluto » Sat, Mar 19, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

danielrhodes wrote: post #75

amluto wrote: post #65

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…

All of the above may be correct, but nothing here advocates for a web service instead of licensed software. If I want to solve a linear program, I can use an open source library or I can pay for a commercial offering, but that commercial offering will run on my hardware (or cloud instance) and will operate independently of the network. If I want to edit a Word document, I can pay Microsoft for a local copy of Word.

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

#124

Post by stevenminhhh » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

fullyforged wrote: post #113

stevenminhhh wrote: post #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.

This is the list of supported languages: https://pspdfkit.com/api/pdf-ocr-api/#supported_languages At the moment we don’t include Japanese and Korean, but I’ll take a note around your questions. Handwriting is definitely a different beast, that’s not supported.

Thanks. I have been dealing with ton of headache from my projects since modifying PDFs can be very problematic. Rather than stitching up multiple libraries, I would rather suggest one platform to handle everything.

Will definitely keep this in mind until it meet my requirements. Is there a mailing list I can sign up for?

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

#125

Post by martin_a » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

muhehe wrote: post #117

martin_a wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you would typically be looking at, is compliance witt the PDF/X standards [1] in various levels, which are basically ISO norms for PDFs. Files for printing production need to have their fonts embedded, color profiles attached/at least tagged to images, transparency dealt with, lots of stuff that ensures that the PDF itself contains all the necessary information for a successful reproducting/printing on a printin…

Thanks! > Most PDF generators out there are not able ... Do you know of any compatible?

I'm mainly working with two systems.

The one is PDFlib [1] which can easily be accessed via Java and PHP. As a web guy, I'm using PHP obviously. There's some learning curve to it, and you have to take care of lots of stuff by yourself, but the results are pretty good afterwards.

The second are the products from callas, mainly pdfToolbox [2] and pdfChip [3], which are kind of the de facto standard for the printing industry, at least in my Western Europe bubble.

pdfChip is based around the WebKit rendering engine, so you can work with HTML + CSS and convert your document to a PDF file. The pdfChip internals will take care of PDF/X compliance, if you want to.

pdfToolbox and pdfChip both have a steep learning curve, too, but you'll probably find that with any software that is highly specialized.

[1] https://www.pdflib.com/ [2] https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdftoolbox [3] https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdfchip