marcTPA

4 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   I'm 100% remote since 5 years now. I rolled into it by relocating and having my biggest client OK'ing me working from abroad. This still seems to be the easiest way to convert to being a remote employee to me, build trust with a c
2. 2.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   For the margins there is a global setting in the API that will set the specified margins on the entire document. You can specify additional margins on top of this by setting a margin in css. Page breaks are controlled by the CSS properties
3. 3.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   Interesting idea, I've been planning to build a save as PDF extension around it as a case study. Combining the PDF functionality together with an email function sure is interesting, gonna think this over a bit more. Thanks!
4. 4.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'm not caching at all since I do not want to store any potential confidential data on my servers. The main reason that it's fast is that there are several instances running Chrome headless behind a
5. 5.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   What URL did you try to generate a PDF from? The PDF APi replies with a 422 when it can not connect to the requested URL. This could have a few reasons, the most common one would be if the site you want to generate a PDF for blocks connecti
6. 6.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   Just checked your landing page, great job at making the advantages of your service crystal clear. And of course congrats on launching, always scary to show your baby to the world.
7. 7.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   That's a coincidence :) I used wkhtmltopdf in the past as well but it struggled when dealing with more complex layouts. My stack is a tweaked Chrome headless on Linux in a docker container, exposed by a Node API.
8. 8.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   Thanks for leaving a comment, really appreciate it. The idea of creating a comparison between PDFs rendered with different solutions is genius. Definitely gonna add this. Puppeteer would indeed come close in rendering quality. Improvements
9. 9.▲
   by marcTPA 8y ago

   Thanks a lot for the constructive feedback. Noting them in down my priority list. You're right, the most common use case would be that a client sends HTML instead of an URL to the endpoint. This way a PDF can be created of data that&#x
10. 10.▲
    by marcTPA 8y ago

    Thanks for your feedback. You are right that generating PDFs from HTML and Web Technologies is nothing new. Most existing PHP and node libs sadly don't provide great rendering once you have a document that consists of modern CSS and HT
11. 11.▲
    by marcTPA 8y ago

    Thank you. Pricing is still experimental, I'm hoping that the easy API interface and the lack of maintenance that my clients would need to do provide a lot more value than the monthly cost. The stack is Linux on Docker, running a tweak
12. 12.▲
    by marcTPA 8y ago

    Thanks for the kind words!
13. 13.▲
    by marcTPA 8y ago

    A little addendum, I'm also contemplating to create a manual service where you could send me a document in any format (JPG, PSD, Microsoft Word) and I'd create a REST endpoint that you can call with the data that you want to have
14. 14.▲
    Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

    41 points by marcTPA 8y ago|36 comments