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

Post by oldandboring » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #54

nradov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For supply chain workflows the ASC X12 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) industry standard works much better than PDFs. Unfortunately, despite being around for decades in has only been adopted by forward thinking organizations such as Walmart. Most smaller companies and their vendors still haven't implemented EDI. https://developer.walmart.com/home/us-edi/

Insanity. EDI is the only place where people are regularly still paying for message by the kilobyte, where unsecured FTP over the open internet is still a norm, and where entire cottage industries exist to support AVOIDING using EDI. Source: I work in EDI. it's a pain in the rump. Also, EDI is really only good for things like PO's, shipping notices, invoices, sales orders, etc.

Post by dmazzoni » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

AugusteLef wrote: post #71

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.

We felt the same, and that's precisely why we built this tool! The key, as you mentioned, is fidelity, especially for designing complex layouts. We hope to bring something new and valuable to the table. And yes, documents are central to many industries including government, legal, banking etc.

Post by dmazzoni » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

Titou325 wrote: post #21

matteason wrote: post #15

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…

The pricing does go down for larger volumes and is something we still have to narrow down to the exact place that makes sense to companies and is also viable. - We do not force PDF/* profiles down to the user, but it seems that for most of them PDF/UA-1 would be a sensible default. We can extract most of the tags from the HTML semantics by themselves which makes it much easier. - We target the PDF 1.7 spec. Color pro…

Post by breadwinner » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

Titou325 wrote: post #52

breadwinner wrote: post #50

How is this better than writing out an HTML file, then using headless chrome to export to PDF, like this: "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=C:\temp\foo.pdf --no-margins --print-to-pdf-no-header C:\temp\test.mhtml

This brings its own set of challenges. Headers and footers are strictly limited in terms of features, you cannot add footnotes, the notion of page spreads is harder to implement. Then you need to combine that with having a Chrome instance at hand + exposing the needed assets for URL resolution. Definitely not difficult let alone impossible, but not the easiest way to get started :)

Post by Titou325 » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 5:58 PM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #78

Titou325 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings its own set of challenges. Headers and footers are strictly limited in terms of features, you cannot add footnotes, the notion of page spreads is harder to implement. Then you need to combine that with having a Chrome instance at hand + exposing the needed assets for URL resolution. Definitely not difficult let alone impossible, but not the easiest way to get started :)

The easier way costs $0.05 cents per page. Imagine sending an invoice to your customer and the invoice itself costs 5 cents per page! That's prohibitively expensive for many applications. I wouldn't consider any solution that costs more than 1 cent per page.