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

1. WeasyPrint

   1 46 7,709 9.5 Python

   The awesome document factory

   

   Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

   https://weasyprint.org

   I've gone through a number of systems to convert CV's, business cards, and other docs and it hasn't let me down yet.

2. InfluxDB

   www.influxdata.com featured

   InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

   

3. react-print-pdf

   2 9 2,399 9.6 TypeScript

   Build and generate PDF using React 📄 UI kit for PDFs and print documents. Simple, reusable components and templates to create great invoices, docs, brochures. Use your favorite front-end framework React to build your next PDF.

   

4. energy-label-service

   3 1 5 7.0 Java

   Energy Label Generation Service

   

   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 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

5. Open HTML to PDF

   4 5 2,014 0.0 Java

   An HTML to PDF library for the JVM. Based on Flying Saucer and Apache PDF-BOX 2. With SVG image support. Now also with accessible PDF support (WCAG, Section 508, PDF/UA)!

   

6. gofpdf

   5 9 3,688 0.0 Go

   I'm with you..

   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.

7. doconce

   6 1 50 1.3 Python

   Lightweight markup language - Document Once

   

   Funny name! The reason I find it funny is I know some people who made Doconce: https://github.com/doconce/doconce :D

8. gotenberg

   7 56 9,217 9.4 Go

   A developer-friendly API for converting numerous document formats into PDF files, and more!

   

   We're using Gotenberg[1] to convert a rendered web page (with Elixir/Phoenix, in our case) to PDF. Works like a charm and we can use our existing frontend code/styling (including SVG graph generators) which is a huge bonus.

   1: https://gotenberg.dev/

9. SaaSHub

   www.saashub.com featured

   SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

   

10. pdf-lib

    8 26 7,567 0.0 TypeScript

    Create and modify PDF documents in any JavaScript environment

    

    I'm facing that same pain point of programmatic PDF filling. I noodled around in the PDF format and learned it's a bit difficult to deal with fonts and formatting. But I think this client-side library works well enough, as a start: https://pdf-lib.js.org/#:~:text=a%20single%20document.-,Fill...

    I've also heard of one paid API that I forgot but seemed to work well, and this related service https://www.jotform.com/, and I also considered porting some server-side libraries to WASM. One day I'll collect all the libraries and findings in a blog post.

    Are you looking to programmatically fill any PDF form by detecting the fields? Or are you filling one known PDF template?

11. react-pdf

    9 55 15,623 9.1 TypeScript

    📄 Create PDF files using React

    

    https://github.com/diegomura/react-pdf is good as well if you want to use React.

12. pandoc

    10 444 37,382 9.8 Haskell

    Universal markup converter

    

    Congrats on the launch, I guess, but there are so many free options that I can't think of a situation where paying $0.25 per document would be justified...? Just to name a few:

    Back in the days, I used to use XSL-FO [0] and it was okay. It was not very precise but it rarely if ever broke, and was perfectly integrated with an XML/XSLT solution. Yeah, this was a long time ago.

    Last month I used html-to-pdfmake [1] and it's also not very precise and more fragile, but very efficient and fast.

    Yet another approach would be to pro grammatically generate .rtf files (for example) and use Pandoc [2] to produce PDFs (I have not tried this in production but don't see why it wouldn't work).

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects

    [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-to-pdfmake

    [2] https://pandoc.org/

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