Comment by matteason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matteason | Hacker News Reader

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

[1] https://github.com/danfickle/openhtmltopdf

The pricing does go down for larger volumes and is something we still have to narrow down to the exact place that makes sense to companies and is also viable.

- 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 :)

So are you saying that you don't output tagged PDFs now?

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.

As mentioned in another comment, "Onedoc generates tagged PDFs as long as you add a `title` property to the API call to make the PDF UA/1 compliant."! Hope it helps

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