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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

#101

Post by Titou325 »

mstijak wrote: post #97

Congratulations on the launch — it looks fantastic! My company is also developing a similar product. We've chosen to create a visual report designer that enables end-users (non-developers) to create and tweak PDF reports, and integrate with the existing IT infrastructure via the API. Our experience is that users want changes in reports very often and that it's best to allow them do it on their own. https://www.cx-rep…

Really like your approach! We tried to keep things tied to code as much as possible rather than dealing with complex interfaces between changing inputs and outputs. Most legal and tech teams we talked to pointed to the fact that CI/CD would quickly become unbearable when decoupling documents and code implementation. What is your approach on that?

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

#102

Post by egnehots »

The main issue is conflating templating and pdf generation.

Using html to pdf solutions allow to do the templating in html, where it is pretty much a solved issue.

And as many said, headless chrome is a robust html to pdf solution, even though it feel like a hack.

But, yeah, there seems to be a lack of awareness about these options within corporations. So, kudos to you for addressing a genuine problem!

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

#103

Post by Titou325 »

Oras wrote: post #12

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…

We actually take HTML as an input to our API converter. The React tooling is mostly to ease the barrier with most frontend codebases, as well as leverage the existing ecosystem of components.

It seems that these conversion engines are massive pieces of work that require a lot of upkeep, partly because CSS is a living spec but also because of the sheer number of edge cases.

We are already working on SOC2 as this has been a recurring ask, and indeed documents almost always contain PII.

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

#104

Post by kodt »

wonger_ wrote: post #67
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.

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 s…

Years ago I needed to programmatically fill PDFs and used this library to achieve it. Funny it has the same name as what you linked: https://www.pdflib.com/

It is a paid commercial product however.

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

#105

Post by baggy_trough »

This is definitely a somewhat painful process. I have done it with puppeteer / chromium on Debian, and it works very well after the headache of figuring it out. Having to pay 50 cents per PDF and deal with a 3rd party vendor would not provide value for our needs.

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

#106

Post by kodt »

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…

There have long been free HTML-PDF options around, but at the same time commercial products that offered more features. Some examples are opening an existing PDF and modifying it, adding to it, merging PDFs, or filling PDF forms.

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

#107

Post by mstijak »

Titou325 wrote: post #101
mstijak wrote: post #97

Congratulations on the launch — it looks fantastic! My company is also developing a similar product. We've chosen to create a visual report designer that enables end-users (non-developers) to create and tweak PDF reports, and integrate with the existing IT infrastructure via the API. Our experience is that users want changes in reports very often and that it's best to allow them do it on their own. https://www.cx-rep…

Really like your approach! We tried to keep things tied to code as much as possible rather than dealing with complex interfaces between changing inputs and outputs. Most legal and tech teams we talked to pointed to the fact that CI/CD would quickly become unbearable when decoupling documents and code implementation. What is your approach on that?

We offer comprehensive import/export functionality, ensuring seamless transfer of reports between environments. Moreover, workspaces allow you to segregate test and production environments or create unique environments for each client, allowing easy report customization. While reports are simply JSON files, which could theoretically be stored on the file system and checked in, doing so would hurt the flexibility we're trying to achieve.

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

#109

Post by staffors »

staffors wrote: post #108

I see that you support page breaks and headers and footers and stuff which is very cool. Is there some form of widow/orphan control when text wraps from one page to the next? How do you handle things like a large table that is longer than the length of a page?

Also, do you different paper sizes (A4 and Letter)?

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

#110

Post by Titou325 »

staffors wrote: post #109
staffors wrote: post #108

I see that you support page breaks and headers and footers and stuff which is very cool. Is there some form of widow/orphan control when text wraps from one page to the next? How do you handle things like a large table that is longer than the length of a page?

Also, do you different paper sizes (A4 and Letter)?

We support the size[1] property and the widows and orphans[2] spec for both your needs :)

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@page/size [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/orphans

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