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Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

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Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#11

Post by passion__desire »

Titou325 wrote: post #4
Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

May be this is just me but this looks extremely costly to me! It will cost $2,500 to generate 50,000 PDFs. Are edits/corrections additional cost?

This is a good point, and we are still trying to figure out how to price things fairly. Depending on the type of PDF, whether it is a simple receipt or a large multi-pages report, associated costs are very different on our side. At this time, we rely on other proprietary software that we are aiming to replace but that incur high costs on our side as well. Edits and corrections on generated PDFs is not provided as the…

Edits would be limited to certain pages but may spill over (e.g. tables) so the whole PDF need not be generated. Only edited pages can be inserted back to previously generated PDFs. Could be an optimization to reduce cost.

Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#12

Post by Oras »

This is definitely a huge market. Are you targeting React developers only? I've successfully used html2pdf in the past, but looking again at their Github, it seems there has been no update in the last three years.

I think SOC2 is a must to start engaging with companies. Most PDFs will have sensitive data, and not many companies will feel comfortable sending customer data to a 3rd party platform, so you need security measures and certifications.

Good luck!

Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#13

Post by Titou325 »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #9

Is this just a wrapper around Puppeteer that renders a pdf? I do this currently with an AWS lambda that has a chrome-aws-lambda layer.

We use a dedicated HTML to PDF engine (such as PrinceXML) rather than building on top of a browser. Main issue with browser-backed implementations is that PDFs are often of subpar quality. However, the main good thing is you can rely on the latest CSS features.

In the end, what was the main decisive factor is the support for the PrintCSS and PagedMedia specifications, which have been completely discarded by major vendors and only implemented by specific engines.

Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#15

Post by matteason »

Really interesting product. I do agree that the pricing seems steep ($0.25/document on Pro on the most generous tier) but I don't know enough about pricing B2B products to know if that would be a blocker.

I agree that HTML -> PDF can be a really powerful tool. I worked on the UK government's tool to generate energy efficiency labels for consumer goods [0] and we ended up doing PDF generation with SVG templates, using Open HTML to PDF for the conversion. That ended up working very well, though as you allude to there can be some gotchas (eg unsupported CSS features) that you need to work around.

A few questions:

- Do the rendered documents support PDF's various accessibility features?

- How suitable is this for print PDF generation? For example, what version of the PDF spec do you target? What's your colour profile support like? Do you support the different PDF page boxes (MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox, ArtBox)?

[0] https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/energy-label-service

[1] https://github.com/danfickle/openhtmltopdf

Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#16

Post by Leoko »

I had to deal a lot with PDF generation over the past few years and I was very unhappy with the eco-system that was available:

1. HTML-to-PDF: The web has a great layout system that works well for dynamic content. So using that seems like a good idea. BUT it is not very efficient as a lot of these libraries simply spin up a headless browser or deal with virtual doms.

2. PDF Libraries (like jsPDF): They mostly just have methods like ".text(x, y, string) which is an absolute pain to work with when building dynamic content or creating complex layouts.

This was such a pain point in various projects I worked on that I built my own library that has a component system to build dynamic layouts (like tables over multiple pages) and then computes that down to simple jsPDF commands. Giving you the best of both worlds.

Hope this makes somebody's life a bit easier: https://github.com/DevLeoko/painless-pdf

Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#19

Post by DutchHugo »

winter-day wrote: post #3

Congrats! My career has also revolved around PDF generation (once for federal compliance at large companies, second for scrubbing data from PDFs for HIPAA compliance and then generating a new pdf based on the scrubbed data). I think I've seen your tool around, I ended up creating a workflow that generated LateX scripts then converted them to pdfs, and the second a python library. The most difficult aspect for our too…

Curious, which python library did you use to convert to PDFs? currently looking into a couple options myself

Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

#20

Post by Crowberry »

This looks really interesting! One of the main reasons we've opted to writing a more complex rending code is for speed. We're getting around 500ms for a single document, which is (last I tested) quicker than any headless chrome setup.

How long does it take to render using your API? :)

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