I work at a company that has a pretty comprehensive suite of PDF templates we fill out, so if you want some feedback from someone who would have been a perfect customer 3 years ago:<p>The biggest thing that costs us time is schema validation. We ended up building a tool that rejects uploads if the text fields don't match, or if you forget to include a radio option, etc. It also has "recommended" fields which issue warnings if they are not implemented.<p>Radio options, checkboxes, and images (for signatures) would be a welcome addition that I didn't see in the editor.<p>The documentation / online demo doesn't make it clear how I would go from fields -> API access (because how do I name the fields?).<p>[append]<p>An API endpoint to get the unfilled PDF template would also be good, especially if bundled with a client library that handled the call to pdftk. Some of our documents are HIPAA and I don't want to deal with having the client data leave our machines.
Hi HN. I built PDF Otter to solve a headache my last company faced. We needed to fill in PDF contracts repeatedly and there was no service out there that did that, so we had to build something in-house. We couldn't use [hello/docu]sign because sending users there lowered our conversion rates.<p>The PDF Otter API powers the PDF editor advertised on the homepage. The editor is simple but I think its better than similar services because you don't need to sign up/pay to fill-in and download your PDF. I think there's a lot of potential out there for apps built on the API. Feel free to reach out to me at mariusz [at] pdfotter [dot] com if you have any questions or ideas!
We (Quiki YC W17) are currently using Otter to make our entire contract/agreement process self service, and it's been great. I can answer any questions from a customer perspective.
The forms extensions in PDF are a problem in FOSS software. I'm wondering if this tool does, or can export the downloaded (edited) PDF as PDF/A-2 (or PDF/A-3) conforming? Because a problem is having PDFs you've filled out that aren't archival documents; and further to that a nice option would be support for embedded digital signatures.
I don't get it. What advantage does this service have over using a pdf library to insert additional text?
Why do I need an external server for this text insertion task?
This is something I expected smallpdf.com to have, since they have a great suite of pdf tools. I just checked and indeed they are running a beta on their Edit PDF feature now, which is similar to your editor. However the API aspect is a big plus on your side. The output from Smallpdf is more precise though.
Raise the price and make the free tier run out at 500 total (not/month) PDFs. Send out emails asking for CC when users hit 250, 350, 400 etc. If they hit 500 + grace, cut service.
It says it's secure.<p>No privacy policy. Nothing except "we delete your PDFs after 24 hours".<p>No security guarantee.<p>No performance bond.<p>(Do I expect that for free? No. But I expect the documentation to be there.)
I've been after something like this for a while. It would be nice if you could position fields with x and y coords. So you can line things up easier.<p>Also being able to preview text settings as you create templates would be nice.
Tried it but the positioning was off by about 1 cm in the produced PDF.<p>You could add alignment tools for multiple fields - look at Inkscape for inspiration.