Billions of PDFs are generated daily: invoices, contracts, receipts, reports, you name it. Developer time gets wasted producing these basic documents because there are no good-enough tools to design and generate PDFs.
We previously worked at giant firms, where documents (especially PDFs) were central to most workflows. We got asked to generate automated trade confirmations for our customer’s counterparties. We could not find any tool other than outdated libraries offering poor control over layout and the generation process. In the end, we just created our own—basically bringing web technologies to PDFs. That was the genesis of Onedoc.
PDF creation has two phases: design (specifying content and layout) and generation (producing the actual PDF file). Onedoc lets you do both simply and automatically.
Design: we have an open-source library called "react-print-pdf" (https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf ) that allows you to design a document the same way you would design a website. It supports Tailwind CSS components, Chakra UI components, and recently also built LaTeX and Markdown components. The latter let you write text in Markdown style, and include formulas using LaTeX syntax, directly within a React component.
Generation: we have an API (https://docs.onedoclabs.com/api-reference/introduction ) and Node.js SDK (https://docs.onedoclabs.com/quickstart/nodejs ) that render your designs into PDFs.
The choice of renderer significantly affects the accuracy of the resulting PDF. For example, exporting a webpage into PDF will often result in a layout that differs from the original webpage. We ensure that what you designed is what you get, and therefore you have 100% control over the entire layout of your document including margin, style, etc. We can do that because we built the react-print-pdf library to match the HTML/CSS to PDF rendering tool we have.
Once you have generated your document, you can either store it on your local system or, if you want, use our platform (https://app.onedoclabs.com/ ) to host your document online. If you use us, you’ll also get analytics over your documents.
Our main product is an API, but you can try it on our website directly (https://www.onedoclabs.com/) using our playground without any installation or sign-up. Our pricing is usage-based: per document generated. The pricing is degressive: the more documents you generate, the less you pay per document. If you don’t want to pay for PDF generation, you can still generate as many documents as you want, but with a watermark on the margin.
It’s been fun to see what our users are building with our open-source library (components, templates, etc.) and our API. We have a website (https://react-print.onedoclabs.com/) dedicated to the open-source library where we post the templates submitted by the community. Some early power users built simple web apps (CV/Resume generator, NDA and Invoice generator). We are excited to show our product to the HN community and look forward to your feedback!
Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
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