Billions of PDFs are generated daily: invoices, contracts, receipts, reports, you name it. Developer time gets wasted producing these basic documents because there are no good-enough tools to design and generate PDFs.
We previously worked at giant firms, where documents (especially PDFs) were central to most workflows. We got asked to generate automated trade confirmations for our customer’s counterparties. We could not find any tool other than outdated libraries offering poor control over layout and the generation process. In the end, we just created our own—basically bringing web technologies to PDFs. That was the genesis of Onedoc.
PDF creation has two phases: design (specifying content and layout) and generation (producing the actual PDF file). Onedoc lets you do both simply and automatically.
Design: we have an open-source library called "react-print-pdf" (https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf ) that allows you to design a document the same way you would design a website. It supports Tailwind CSS components, Chakra UI components, and recently also built LaTeX and Markdown components. The latter let you write text in Markdown style, and include formulas using LaTeX syntax, directly within a React component.
Generation: we have an API (https://docs.onedoclabs.com/api-reference/introduction ) and Node.js SDK (https://docs.onedoclabs.com/quickstart/nodejs ) that render your designs into PDFs.
The choice of renderer significantly affects the accuracy of the resulting PDF. For example, exporting a webpage into PDF will often result in a layout that differs from the original webpage. We ensure that what you designed is what you get, and therefore you have 100% control over the entire layout of your document including margin, style, etc. We can do that because we built the react-print-pdf library to match the HTML/CSS to PDF rendering tool we have.
Once you have generated your document, you can either store it on your local system or, if you want, use our platform (https://app.onedoclabs.com/ ) to host your document online. If you use us, you’ll also get analytics over your documents.
Our main product is an API, but you can try it on our website directly (https://www.onedoclabs.com/) using our playground without any installation or sign-up. Our pricing is usage-based: per document generated. The pricing is degressive: the more documents you generate, the less you pay per document. If you don’t want to pay for PDF generation, you can still generate as many documents as you want, but with a watermark on the margin.
It’s been fun to see what our users are building with our open-source library (components, templates, etc.) and our API. We have a website (https://react-print.onedoclabs.com/) dedicated to the open-source library where we post the templates submitted by the community. Some early power users built simple web apps (CV/Resume generator, NDA and Invoice generator). We are excited to show our product to the HN community and look forward to your feedback!
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!
https://github.com/typst/typst
In C# I'd look to use the Playwright library or perhaps even embed chromium via CerSharp if I were trying to avoid extra processes.
If you can nail accessible PDFs then you'd open up a very big government market.
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?
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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 Open HTML to PDF for the conversion. That ended up working very well, though as you allude to there can be some gotchas (eg unsupported CSS features) that you need to work around.
A few questions:
- Do the rendered documents support PDF's various accessibility features?
- How suitable is this for print PDF generation? For example, what version of the PDF spec do you target? What's your colour profile support like? Do you support the different PDF page boxes (MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox, ArtBox)?
[0] https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/energy-label-service
[1] https://github.com/danfickle/openhtmltopdf
- 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 profiles can be changed and you can use a custom .icc profile, with the corresponding embedding restrictions based on the document format. MediaBox is supported through the @page size property. Bleed, trim and marks can be added using vendor specific css properties. We don't support ArtBox yet but this is something we can look into! So far none of our customers really wanted to take this out to a real print shop, but we would be glad to help people go down this route :)
For those who don't know, if you use Chromium's print-to-pdf feature you get a tagged PDF. And it's scriptable from the command-line too.
That forms a solid foundation that I find it hard to imagine paying for. The things where you might still command a premium are basically safety mechanisms/CI checks/library components that ensure the PDF renders correctly in the presence of variable-length content, etc. as well as maybe PDF-specific features like metadata and fillable forms. Naive ways to format headers, footers, tables/grids/flexboxes etc. often fail in PDFs because of unexpected layout complications. So having a methodology, process, and validation system for ensuring that a mission critical piece of information appears on a PDF in the presence of these constraints could be attractive.
In fact their open source library, https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf, seems like a higher-level library that sits above react-pdf. Reminds me a lot of the set of react-pdf based components I built for a corporate job where letting users create PDFs was a huge part of the value proposition.
They're solving a really cool problem, actually, because building out into certain difficult use cases like SVG support was a huge pain.
Your second point is very interesting, seems like some kind of .assert('text').isVisible() API. We may want to dig into that further!
Cool project btw, congrats for the launch!
Overall you're right that color correction is another area where you could probably command a premium.
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.
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
Edits and corrections on generated PDFs is not provided as the PDFs are signed as-is, however you can attach the metadata to the PDF and rerender with the modifications.
Their PDF conversion is pretty good (I use it for PPT/Word -> PDF conversion), though your product is obviously different and has different/better capabilities for programmatic PDF creation. Still, a reference point.
Pricing page: https://www.convertapi.com/prices
Do not misunderstand. A Stripe for generating PDFs can be great, but for a small team, $0.50/PDF is way more than I can afford (after all, you can create a small number of PDFs without too much fuss). Maybe you are oriented towards large companies?
But isn't that 100x what they're actually charging--at least for an enterprise account? Their pricing page says "from $0.005/doc." (Though I'm not sure how much work "from" is doing there.) Pro tier is, admittedly, more like $0.12 per document (assuming you use your full quota). But still much less than $0.50/
I'm generally very confused by the various assertions in this thread about their pricing. What am I missing?
You can choose which API to use: Headless Chrome, Wkhtmltopdf, Libreoffice, etc.
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 have methods like ".text(x, y, string) which is an absolute pain to work with when building dynamic content or creating complex layouts.
This was such a pain point in various projects I worked on that I built my own library that has a component system to build dynamic layouts (like tables over multiple pages) and then computes that down to simple jsPDF commands. Giving you the best of both worlds.
Hope this makes somebody's life a bit easier: https://github.com/DevLeoko/painless-pdf
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.
We ended up writing a similar wrapper around https://github.com/jung-kurt/gofpdf library. We haven't open sourced it yet. But it's made it a lot easier to deal with rendering a PDF, especially over pagebreaks ect.
If you want granular control over how your PDF will look with content that is more than one page long, you will have a hard time using html.
Though personally I wish stuff like ConTeXt was more popular and approachable - to my humble knowledge their Lua backend seems to have huge potential, I am doing my invoices with ConTeXt/Lua.
We like LaTeX, but even for advanced users laying things out can be a difficult thing. Given that documents are a frontend, we wanted to bring the same tools frontend developers already use.