Love the demo on the homepage with the render button. Really helps explain the product!
Thanks! We try to make our product as accessible as possible for anyone to use (or at least to test). It's good to hear that our efforts have been worthwhile!
Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
61–70 of 191 posts
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#62Congrats on the launch! What's the main advantage over pspdfkit?
It is similar to pspdfkit. We add an abstraction layer over the HTML and assets hosting to make it easier to use without having to think too hard about security and serving assets.
We also hope to keep the focus on the PDF generation part rather than expanding super-horizontal style to provide all imaginable PDF tools at the expense that none is really good.
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#63I wonder what YC expects from such investments (considering the multitude of FOSS solutions in this area).
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#64Reminds me of BrewPDF.com
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah let's give XPS another go.
Giving credit where it's due, I can appreciate Microsoft for introducing XPS as an alternative to pdf. There was a time, when not every software had "export to pdf". So, having a "print to pdf" meant installing (often pirated) Adobe Acrobat or installing a sketchy free(ware) printdriver software downloaded from sourceforge. MS adding xps print driver to windows enabled sharing docs consistently (within windows ecosys…
Indeed, we need to give credit to MS for what they did. However, it didn't catch up as you mentioned, maybe due to timing, skepticism toward MS, or the complexity of moving from Adobe to MS for PDF management. I will dig a bit into it and come back later if I find anything interesting.
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#66I've also spent much longer than I'd like on this same problem. Having a lightweight-enough service to convert html->pdf on the fly, with good fidelity, and that can create an accessible pdf seems to be impossible.
If you can nail accessible PDFs then you'd open up a very big government market.
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#67Glad to see people building in the PDF space, which as a format is unfortunately both awful and ubiquitous. Are you planning to build any support for programmatically filling out existing PDF forms? That's a huge pain point our product is facing that doesn't seem easy to solve.
I'm facing that same pain point of programmatic PDF filling. I noodled around in the PDF format and learned it's a bit difficult to deal with fonts and formatting. But I think this client-side library works well enough, as a start: https://pdf-lib.js.org/#fill-form
I've also heard of one paid API that I forgot but seemed to work well, and this related service https://www.jotform.com/, and I also considered porting some server-side libraries to WASM. One day I'll collect all the libraries and findings in a blog post.
Are you looking to programmatically fill any PDF form by detecting the fields? Or are you filling one known PDF template?
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#68I wonder what YC expects from such investments (considering the multitude of FOSS solutions in this area).
While this may sound a bit counterintuitive (maybe?) we actually pivoted to this field based on YC input and discussions they have had with their previous companies. The multitude of FOSS solutions in this area indicates this is a real problem people are willing to spend time on, and yet there is no go-to solution and every team we have talked to selected different tools based on a very specific requirement.
This may not mean success, it means that game is not over in the documents field :)
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#69I wonder what YC expects from such investments (considering the multitude of FOSS solutions in this area).
While this may sound a bit counterintuitive (maybe?) we actually pivoted to this field based on YC input and discussions they have had with their previous companies. The multitude of FOSS solutions in this area indicates this is a real problem people are willing to spend time on, and yet there is no go-to solution and every team we have talked to selected different tools based on a very specific requirement. This may…
Thanks for the perspective. Indeed, this is an area with real demand. I haven't evaluated YC's recent startups but I trust they do know a bit about what has a better chance in the market. Best of luck :)
ps.: As someone with very minimal PDF needs personally and at work, I'd say the beautiful templates are what caught my attention the most.
Re: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
#70Congrats! 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
weasyprint isn't terrible