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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

#151

Post by somberi »

Useful service and a large problem space. Congrats and all the best. As someone who is a target customer, my 2 cents:

a. If this is a strategic value for my pipeline (and it is), we are going to code it ourselves, only because we can host it inside our fences. Critical customer data and hence.

b. The pricing is way off and is not reflective of the cost or value (for us). Even if it was 1/10th of the prices you charge, it will still be a no-go. At the volumes we have, it makes sense to build this ourselves.

c. SOC2 / ISO27001 - You might want to obtain them asap if you are looking to sell to outsourcing companies or FSG.

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

#152

Post by HatchedLake721 »

somberi wrote: post #151

Useful service and a large problem space. Congrats and all the best. As someone who is a target customer, my 2 cents: a. If this is a strategic value for my pipeline (and it is), we are going to code it ourselves, only because we can host it inside our fences. Critical customer data and hence. b. The pricing is way off and is not reflective of the cost or value (for us). Even if it was 1/10th of the prices you charge…

Curious, with ~$0.005 per document, what volumes do you do that pricing becomes a no-go for you?

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

#153

Post by Perz1val »

admissionsguy wrote: post #84
dmazzoni wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "now"? It has been for years. It's a huge business.

When I was first hired 15 years ago my first task was to create a PDF report. It was easy back then in PHP+fPDF. Two years ago I was hired to work on a Heroku-hosted NodeJS app. I was surprised to find that generating a PDF turned out to be substantially more difficult task, requiring running a browser emulator or connecting to an external service. And now, seeing PDF generation as a premium pay-as-you-go product is…

I'd literally spin up a PHP container with TCPDF and do caveman math on cell sizes. Making something fancy with it is a lot of work, but it is a steady, incremental work. Doing stuff with HTML+CSS conversion is just frustrating and you'll likely get 90% there then spend most of the time kicking and bashing CSS until it behaves nicely in that obscure case. In TCPDF I was able to make a temporary page, write to it, check the positions, discard that page and arrange the actual content based on that. You can't do that with CSS, good luck guessing how much horizontal space the text takes

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

#154

Post by somberi »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #152
somberi wrote: post #151

Useful service and a large problem space. Congrats and all the best. As someone who is a target customer, my 2 cents: a. If this is a strategic value for my pipeline (and it is), we are going to code it ourselves, only because we can host it inside our fences. Critical customer data and hence. b. The pricing is way off and is not reflective of the cost or value (for us). Even if it was 1/10th of the prices you charge…

Curious, with ~$0.005 per document, what volumes do you do that pricing becomes a no-go for you?

In the long term, ~$0.005 per page (as opposed to document, which I assume hatchedlake meant) say on a mortgage document (~300 pages per) it adds up. The other alternative, which is to build this in-house (say 3 months and custom build, edge cases, such goodies), is more desirable (for us).

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

midenginedcoupe wrote: post #66

I'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.

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by steveneo »

dazh wrote: post #22

Glad 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.

For programmatically filling, checkout https://platoforms.com. It even provides a API playground, https://www.platoforms.com/docs/advanced/api-playground/, super easy to test the API on your actual PDF form.

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

#157

Post by Mick-Jogger »

ak217 wrote: post #42

FYI: the open source state of the art in this area is Playwright (the successor to Puppeteer) with Paged.js ( https://pagedjs.org/ ). I highly recommend that everyone check out and donate to paged.js, it's a fantastic project with lots to like. It certainly blows commercial alternatives like Prince XML out of the water. That forms a solid foundation that I find it hard to imagine paying for. The things where you migh…

Isn't Playwright a testing framework, I am not sure how this solves the use-case that Onedoc is aiming for. I would be highly interested in some more background as we are evaluating alternative solutions to princeXML right now.

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

#158

Post by HatchedLake721 »

somberi wrote: post #154
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, with ~$0.005 per document, what volumes do you do that pricing becomes a no-go for you?

In the long term, ~$0.005 per page (as opposed to document, which I assume hatchedlake meant) say on a mortgage document (~300 pages per) it adds up. The other alternative, which is to build this in-house (say 3 months and custom build, edge cases, such goodies), is more desirable (for us).

I was looking at https://www.onedoclabs.com/pricing which says $0.005 per document, not page.

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

#159

Post by ak217 »

Mick-Jogger wrote: post #157
ak217 wrote: post #42

FYI: the open source state of the art in this area is Playwright (the successor to Puppeteer) with Paged.js ( https://pagedjs.org/ ). I highly recommend that everyone check out and donate to paged.js, it's a fantastic project with lots to like. It certainly blows commercial alternatives like Prince XML out of the water. That forms a solid foundation that I find it hard to imagine paying for. The things where you migh…

Isn't Playwright a testing framework, I am not sure how this solves the use-case that Onedoc is aiming for. I would be highly interested in some more background as we are evaluating alternative solutions to princeXML right now.

Playwright at its core is a headless browser driver. In this case, we are using it to tell the browser to generate a PDF.

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

#160

Post by chrisfinazzo »

Leoko wrote: post #16

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 ha…

Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

https://weasyprint.org

Going all the way down to raw HTML is a bit verbose, but with almost anything I've thrown at it - CV's, business cards, you name it - it hasn't let me down yet.

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