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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

#81

Post by jot »

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?

It sounds like this is as advanced as DocRaptor[1]. They have what I consider to be the best PDF generation API, giving complete control over the documents you need to create. The pricing is similar.

If you'd rather do it for free weasyprint[2] is the best open source alternative.

Another more affordable option you might want to consider is Urlbox[3]. (Disclosure: I work on this)

Urlbox's rendering engine is based on Chrome. It's been refined over the last 11 years to render pages as images or PDFs[4] that look great. I was a customer for 5 years before I joined the team. Everything we'd tried before Urlbox was a disappointment.

Urlbox probably can't match the power of either Onedoc or DocRaptor, but pricing starts at less than $0.01 per document and drops significantly with scale. If your PDF looks great when saving as PDF in Chrome it should look identically brilliant with Urlbox.

[1]: https://docraptor.com [2]: https://weasyprint.org [3]: https://urlbox.com [4]: https://urlbox.com/html-to-pdf

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

#82

Post by Titou325 »

dmazzoni wrote: post #74
AugusteLef wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you directly answer whether your tool generates tagged PDFs? Of course, you can't guarantee that the resulting document is 100% compliant because you can't enforce that the input is valid, but are you at least outputting a complete tag tree with as much semantics as possible given the input?

Yes, Onedoc generates tagged PDFs as long as you add a `title` property to the API call to make the PDF UA/1 compliant.

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

#83

Post by AugusteLef »

admissionsguy wrote: post #73

You cannot make this up, generating PDFs is now an enterprise product.

Editors such as Overleaf, and those offered by MS and Adobe, have been around for a long time. Recently, companies like Pandadoc and Docusign have started offering services around PDFs (generation or other aspects of their lifecycle).

It might seem odd, given our long history with PDFs, but I believe there's still much to be done with these documents. They're everywhere—invoices, tickets, reports, etc.—yet the technology for generating and managing them hasn't evolved much in years. Our approach is to apply the same modern technologies used for web design to document design.

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

#84

Post by admissionsguy »

dmazzoni wrote: post #79
admissionsguy wrote: post #73

You cannot make this up, generating PDFs is now an enterprise product.

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 just too much.

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

#85

Post by ochrist »

oldandboring wrote: post #72
calvinmorrison wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Also, EDI is really only good for things like PO's, shipping notices, invoices, sales orders, etc. Don't forget health insurance claims, eligibility & benefits, and prior auth requests!

EDI is used in a lot of situations for machine-to-machine communications, but outside USA I believe EDIFACT is much more used (X12 is mostly used in USA).

Today many EDIFACT documents have been converted to ebXML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EbXML

Source: Worked in EDI for a few years

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

#86

Post by Titou325 »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #77

Hmm interesting... I just went through this user experience on iOS generating PDF invoices locally. I attempted the HTML > PDF route, but Webkit is thorny wrt to layouts (as you mentioned). I did settle in with drawing everything from the ground up > which with LLMs wasn't as hairy as it used to be, even got a little Swift framework out of the deal. Am I understanding the docs correctly that you don't have a local li…

You are right in the sense we do not provide a local library. We considered the option but would have brought a lot of challenges to accommodate the various runtimes and device capabilities.

This may come at a later stage once we have built our own rendering engine though

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

#87

Post by ochrist »

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.

You don't have to pay for message by the kilobyte. This is only true if you use an external vendor for the conversion or use a VAN for transmission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_network

Source: Worked in EDI for a few years

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

#90

Post by AugusteLef »

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…

Makes sense. Actually, if you keep the layout/content very simple, aren't constrained by throughput, and don't need to integrate dynamic data or other similar processes, then simple FOSS could indeed get the job done! That's exactly why we developed the open-source library react-print-pdf
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