7 ms·
Ask HN: Have you built internal tools to generate complex PDFs?
I’m working on a modular doc engine for generating complex PDFs; think insurance policy docs, contracts, compliance forms.
We’ve spoken with insurtech teams dealing with template sprawl from manual copy-paste, PDF logic buried in code that eng teams have to maintain.
If you’ve dealt with this in the past: what did you build? What failed? What would have helped?
Would love your thoughts: https://sutro.one
- dClauzel 1y agoGenerating a XeLaTeX source document, then compiling it to produce the PDF.
- haesunshine 1y agoI see. Would you be open to sharing which industry you worked in?
- pestatije 1y agothe search term you need is "reporting tool", of which there are zillions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reporting_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reporting_software
- haesunshine 1y agoThanks for your thoughts
- zarekr 1y agoTypst is really good for this. The syntax takes a little bit of getting used to but on the whole I’ve had a lot of success producing contracts and other legal documents with it. I tend to assemble the input files using a templating engine and then use the compiler in a subprocess. The compiler is very fast and the development is pretty active. The output is much easier to manage than with packages like reportlab.