PDF API
Infrastructure
pdf processing api
SHOW HN2022
204points
116comments
#275of 2,570 in 2022
Top 11%of 2022 by points
How HN took it
CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments
4 positive, 25 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 15 critical, out of 47 comments about the project. Thread score -0.33.
Pricing: 1 for, 5 againstIdea: 2 for, 4 againstExecution: 1 for, 2 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Useful product and nice SDKs
From 2 comments
Very useful product, congratulations. ;-) Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no…
lgvld on HNVery cool! Consider perhaps adding one more call, one to remove passwords. Not brute force, although that would be cool too, but just one that let's you specify the password and…
koinexpert on HN
Good documentation
From 1 comment
Really handy service, even if there are probably a lot out there already. The following might be worth to check out: - https://docspring.com/ - https://bulk-pdf.com/ However a…
passenger09 on HN
Objections
Pricing is high and document limits too low
From 3 comments
Very useful product, congratulations. ;-) Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no…
lgvld on HNA few years ago, $COMPANY had similar needs for a client. I ended up creating an in-house solution, which has a surprisingly close API (well, there are only so many ways to do…
yyyk on HNIt all sounds great until you get a quote. $15,000/yr for an API to sign a PDF. Come on.
throw03172019 on HN
Privacy concerns with sending documents to an online API
From 2 comments
Not a good usecase for an online API. To the extent that those PDFs could include sensitive information, there's a huge security/privacy headache there, with no real benefit when…
gyulai on HN"The cloud" is not one thing. Each additional company in "the cloud" that gets to see your data increases the attack surface.
gyulai on HN
Vendor lock-in and longevity risk of a commercial API
From 3 comments
So what exactly does that leave? A wrapper that you've created around weasyprint, pandoc, latex, ghostscript, imagemagick, and stuff like that? Sounds to me like an unnecessary…
gyulai on HNWhat I wanted to say was: "PDF processing is something where I wouldn't want to rely on an online API over something local. And it's also something where I wouldn't want to rely…
gyulai on HNSome time ago at a $Company we needed to generate pdfs and also OCR incoming documents. In order to quickly release a product we decided to use online API from a $Vendor. Initial…
zihotki on HN
Predatory sales model reported
From 1 comment
Just an FYI but PSPDFKit has a very predatory sales model. Our organization received pricing that was generally very high and we pushed back on it because we were a startup and…
ianhawes on HN
Requests
Consumption-based pricing without hard caps
From 2 comments
A few years ago, $COMPANY had similar needs for a client. I ended up creating an in-house solution, which has a surprisingly close API (well, there are only so many ways to do…
yyyk on HNVery useful product, congratulations. ;-) Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no…
lgvld on HN
PDF signing support
From 1 comment
Very nice and useful product! Question: do you have or plan to support PDF signatures? This may be then useful for us[1], we issue qualified certificates and eIDAS-compliant…
wfn on HN
Japanese and Korean OCR support
From 1 comment
Do you have any plan in your roadmap to support different languages in the OCR feature? I'm specifically interested in recognize and processing PDF files written in Japanese and…
stevenminhhh on HN
Remove password from PDF call
From 1 comment
Very cool! Consider perhaps adding one more call, one to remove passwords. Not brute force, although that would be cool too, but just one that let's you specify the password and…
koinexpert on HN
Questions
Does it handle large tables spanning pages
From 1 comment
How well does this handle large tables that span pages? That seems to be a key differentiator for most PDF libs I sampled. I'd assume this works well if it's coming from Chromium
mdellavo on HN
Is there a page limit per document
From 1 comment
From the pricing page, limits seem to be on number of documents, not number of pages. Is the number of pages per document also limited?
steerablesafe on HN
Which rendering engine is used
From 1 comment
Which rendering engine are you using in the backend?
martin_a on HN
Alternatives named
Open source PDF tools (pdftk, pdf-lib, OpenPDF, LibreOffice, Puppeteer)
From 4 comments
I recently went down the PDF rabbit hole for a project. I had to use different OSS tools to do everything I wanted. I was able to access three from within nodejs without touching…
voiper1 on HNIt looks interesting, but addresses a scale that I don't work on. For my personal needs, I use pdftk from the command line.
brudgers on HNOpenPDF https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF
roschdal on HNI was contracted to make a legal document generation service for a client. I looked at all of these tools and decided to just use HTML/CSS and then print to PDF via puppeteer on…
smashah on HN
Transloadit
From 1 comment
> What differentiates our API from others is that you can chain together multiple “actions” as part of a single API request. https://transloadit.com offers similar composable…
kvz on HN
DocSpring and Bulk-PDF
From 1 comment
Really handy service, even if there are probably a lot out there already. The following might be worth to check out: - https://docspring.com/ - https://bulk-pdf.com/ However a…
passenger09 on HN