Dear HN, I would pay for: A document conversion web service | Hacker News Reader

Dear HN, I would pay for: A document conversion web service

6 pointsmatt20006 comments

(Thought it might be interesting to post things that I would pay for. Maybe it could turn into a business for someone on HN.)

We need to import and convert documents of all varieties. Currently we do our own conversion of things like doc, docx and pdf into fairly plain HTML. I'd like to support more formats but we don't really have the time. If there was a service that took a document and output it in a specified format I would probably pay for it. Even better if it was a heroku addon.

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We've just launched a new REST API which supports Conversion of the full range of Office and Image formats as well as creating from scratch using Templates and a lot more like barcode recognition and (soon) OCR. We're just getting ready to complete our BETA stage and looking to get more people to try it out.

We have some Ruby sample code and a Heroku add-ons is in the works.

Please check it out - I'm looking for as much feedback as possible at this stage: http://saaspose.com

Hey, this looks like it might be exactly what I was looking for! I will definitely give this a try and let you know how it goes. I see that the pricing hasn't been determined yet though, which might be a factor if we're expecting higher volumes ultimately.

Hi Matt - we're just trying out pricing models and finalising them. If you drop me a line by email (just at the contact address on the website), I can explain our ideas as they stand. It's also good to get real users thoughts what type of pricing scheme works best for the Apps you'd be creating.

I've been working on something along these lines for a while now with a good friend of mine. It takes any doc, docx & pdf and strips all the formatting and repopulates a new doc, docx or PDF in a predetermined format.

I can't imagine it would be immensely difficult to alter it to produce a plain HTML version. Watch this space...

Have you seen docraptor? http://docraptor.com/

They have a heroku addon as well.

I have seen that, thanks for reminding me though. From what I can tell it's just for PDF generation though, right?

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