Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

Looks nice, well done.

Though I worry about the narrowness and "whip-up-ability" for the price and target market. It's a small enough featureset in a domain that skews technical, many would be inclined to template an HTML table to wkhtml2pdf and call it a day. Maybe they'd open source it after. I suppose you're aiming for the people who wouldn't do that, but would still expend the effort of integrating with an external HTTP API (and paying monthly for it)

I know a measure of a project's usefulness is "if a HN commenter says they could make it in a weekend but haven't, you've got something!", so maybe I'm wrong.

P.s. 50 pages / 1Mb per PDF is ludicrously far too small for a business tier.

I think this is great but you might need to think about your point of difference. I suspect you have a product here but it might need some refining.

I asked Claude to create me something to do this. It worked first go.

import json from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Table, TableStyle, Paragraph from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet from reportlab.lib import colors

def create_pdf_from_json(json_file, pdf_file): # Read JSON data with open(json_file, 'r') as file: data = json.load(file)

    # Create PDF document
    doc = SimpleDocTemplate(pdf_file, pagesize=letter)
    elements = []

    # Add title
    styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
    elements.append(Paragraph("JSON Data Report", styles['Title']))
    elements.append(Paragraph("\n", styles['Normal']))

    # Create table data
    table_data = [["Key", "Value"]]
    for key, value in data.items():
        table_data.append([str(key), str(value)])

    # Create table
    table = Table(table_data, colWidths=[200, 300])
    table.setStyle(TableStyle([
        ('BACKGROUND', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.grey),
        ('TEXTCOLOR', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.whitesmoke),
        ('ALIGN', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 'CENTER'),
        ('FONTNAME', (0, 0), (-1, 0), 'Helvetica-Bold'),
        ('FONTSIZE', (0, 0), (-1, 0), 14),
        ('BOTTOMPADDING', (0, 0), (-1, 0), 12),
        ('BACKGROUND', (0, 1), (-1, -1), colors.beige),
        ('TEXTCOLOR', (0, 1), (-1, -1), colors.black),
        ('ALIGN', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 'CENTER'),
        ('FONTNAME', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 'Helvetica'),
        ('FONTSIZE', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 12),
        ('TOPPADDING', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 6),
        ('BOTTOMPADDING', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 6),
        ('GRID', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 1, colors.black)
    ]))

    elements.append(table)

    # Build PDF
    doc.build(elements)

if __name__ == "__main__": create_pdf_from_json("input.json", "output.pdf")

Sure, here is the prompt.

Can you write me a program that can generate formatted PDFs from JSON? Preferably using the simplest of tools

If it was just that, I'd probably load onto a pandas df, then export the df to json. There's other ways, but this would be a simple enough way.

Check,

- https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/p...

- https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/p...

Try something like,

    import pandas as pd

    file_path = 'excel_file.xlsx'
    df = pd.read_excel(file_path, sheet_name='WORKSHEET NAME')
    df.to_json('output.json', orient='records', indent=4)

Thanks for the feedback! You're right, many technical users could likely roll their own solution, and for one-off projects, that's a valid approach. However, after working on this for a while, I've found that building a more generic and flexible solution is definitely not a simple task. The goal with SnazzyPDF is to hide the more complicated bits like the layout and consistent formatting of deeply nested JSON, without the need for maintenance. It's aimed for the people who value saving time over building from scratch. I know, maybe it's not really for the most hacker-minded.

Regarding the page/file size limits, that's helpful input. I have set the current limits based on my own experience but haven't had much opportunity to validate them yet. I’ll definitely take another look and try to find a good balance.