Hi HN,<p>Nick here. We're super excited to officially launch PDF.js Express [1].<p>PDF.js Express wraps a modern React UI around the PDF.js rendering engine to enable PDF annotation, form filling, and signing inside your web app. We've also made some improvements to PDF.js text search, and taken a different approach to how the viewer uses the PDF.js rendering API, resulting in sharp graphics at any zoom magnification [2].<p>Based on our research, more than 70% of those who try to implement these features on top of PDF.js find it too difficult or time-intensive [3]. For those who are successful, supporting the new functionality is also challenging. To help these developers in achieving their short-term goals, and to support them as their needs evolve, we built PDF.js Express.<p>Check out the demo and let us know what you think or if you have any questions [4].<p>If you're helping fight COVID-19, it's free [5].<p>[1] <a href="https://pdfjs.express/blog/introducing-pdfjs-express" rel="nofollow">https://pdfjs.express/blog/introducing-pdfjs-express</a><p>[2] <a href="https://pdfjs.express/pdfjs-vs-express" rel="nofollow">https://pdfjs.express/pdfjs-vs-express</a><p>[3] <a href="https://pdfjs.express/blog/build-vs-buy" rel="nofollow">https://pdfjs.express/blog/build-vs-buy</a><p>[4] <a href="https://pdfjs.express/demo" rel="nofollow">https://pdfjs.express/demo</a><p>[5] <a href="https://pdfjs.express/blog/pdfjs-express-free-to-those-fighting-covid-19" rel="nofollow">https://pdfjs.express/blog/pdfjs-express-free-to-those-fight...</a>
I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor <a href="https://www.Photopea.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.Photopea.com</a> .<p>While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible.<p>You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as CSS or export it into an SVG.<p>Also, it is free. People open about 150,000 PDF files a month in it, but I hope it will get more popular in the future.<p>Demo PDF: <a href="https://www.photopea.com/api/img2/WEBSITE-ZLONIN-uprava.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.photopea.com/api/img2/WEBSITE-ZLONIN-uprava.pdf</a><p>Photopea: <a href="https://www.photopea.com#%7B%22files%22:%5B%22https://www.photopea.com/api/img2/WEBSITE-ZLONIN-uprava.pdf%22%5D%7D" rel="nofollow">https://www.photopea.com#%7B%22files%22:%5B%22https://www.ph...</a> (press T and click into the text to edit it)
Some feedback.<p>Website design is poor. You could definitely do with a designer to make it look nicer.<p>$5000ish a year is a weird price point. It's too expensive for a hobbyist or small dev shop, but too cheap for an enterprise to buy (when you consider the time of working on procurement problems you'll experience).<p>You either need to make it cheap, like $200/yr, or much more expensive. Right now you are in no mans land.<p>You also have a * next to limited support on pricing page, but I can't see what that explains.<p>Offering no refunds is strange and your copy comes off passive aggressive about this. Why? As a new service I'd be all about offering full refunds with no questions asked. Most people don't ask for refunds, and you can learn very important information when they ask for one.<p>Terms page is very short and doesn't have a lot of terms I'd expect for a product charging $5k/yr.<p>Don't worry about it not being open source; that's fine.
Nicely done!<p>For non-React users (and React users, for that matter), I started working on wrapping PDF.js up into a web component for use in any framework or in plain HTML or Markdown: <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/pdf-viewer-element" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/pdf-viewer-element</a><p>The idea is to make a `<pdf-viewer>` element that's as easy to use as if it were built-in to the browser.<p>As PDF.js Express shows, this is a pretty deep UI and feature area to tackle. My project is incomplete and doesn't have anywhere close to the features.<p>I think complex viewers are one of the ideal use cases for web components though. These components require a lot of work to do well, and we shouldn't have to re-implement them for every framework. The 3D gltf viewer, `<model-viewer>`[1] is another great example.<p>[1]: <a href="https://modelviewer.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://modelviewer.dev/</a>
I'm all about the open core business model.. but are you guys affiliated with the core pdf.js team?<p>$440 / month is pretty hard to swallow. I love that you guys included a build vs buy section, but I think it's going to be difficult to land clients at this price point because higher end clients are more likely to choose the build vs buy option.<p>Anyhow, the product itself looks well structured. Congrats & best of luck.
This reminds me of the people who tried to sell Blender a couple of years ago [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.blendernation.com/2009/06/11/3dmagix-re-branding-and-selling-the-free-software-blender/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blendernation.com/2009/06/11/3dmagix-re-branding...</a>
I have a startup and we are highly reliant on PDF rendering in our application. But here's the thing, Nik: your pricing model doesn't make sense to me. In general, most PDF SDK models don't make sense. I have searched a lot over the years, and am left consistently disappointed.<p>You charge the same amount to large commercial customers as you do to small startups, who are trying to save every penny. Even though I really value the technology you have built, you have not allowed us to "pay-as-we-go". I am not interested in your trial and the trials of your competitors because you don't allow me to start with a $5/month plan based on volume of usage. And so, we have resorted to writing the wrappers around PDFJS ourselves, slowly and steadily over months and years. Even though we might end up spending the same amount over 2 years by doing these things ourselves, at least we will understand the technology and own it perpetually.<p>Just charge us based on volume, so your revenue can align with our revenue. It will create much larger traction among small developers. If you are not targeting that audience, I understand, but I contend that most people on places like HN are that audience. Be more like Crocodoc (the company Box acquired). I really don't want us to keep reinventing the pieces here because this is not our core competency.
FIle is here
<a href="https://registry.npmjs.org/@pdftron/pdfjs-express/-/pdfjs-express-6.2.1.tgz" rel="nofollow">https://registry.npmjs.org/@pdftron/pdfjs-express/-/pdfjs-ex...</a><p>They bundle both a Apache 2.0 "PDFJS-LICENSE" AND a "PDF.js Express Evaluation License.pdf" which seem to conflict with each other.
Hi Nick,<p>Congrats on your launch. Just wanted to tell you that there's another service called PDF eXpress that's in use for IEEE conferences to make sure the authors conform to the given template. I know it's not exactly the same name, but might be worth looking into viz. copyright or trademarks.<p>More info on PDF eXpress: <a href="https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/pdfexpress.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/pdfexpress.html</a>
I work in an industry that marks up PDFs extensively (construction) and have wanted to build a bespoke PDF markup tool for a long time. In designing concrete floor slabs, we need to transfer information from our FEA software to a dwg. Currently a blank plan is printed, it’s marked up by hand, and then handed to a drafter to put back into the computer. It’s a very inefficient process. But all the SDKs are stupidly expensive (this one included). It’s really surprising there isn’t something open source, given the importance of PDF markup in many industries and businesses.
RE: the "Extract & parse content" feature, does this mean you can parse and extract data from PDF documents like bank statements or invoices?
How would this compare to something like syncfusion pdf viewer - <a href="https://www.syncfusion.com/angular-ui-components/angular-pdf-viewer" rel="nofollow">https://www.syncfusion.com/angular-ui-components/angular-pdf...</a><p>It handles chopping up the pdf into pieces on the server as well as storage of annotations and some other stuff. We just got done integrating this in to a big MEANS stack app and hit a ton of challenges both client side and server.<p>On the client side we wanted to customize the annotation dialogs which required a ton of hacking.( we upload images and video snippets and role based access to annotations. We wanted to load two PDFs side by side and sync scrolling (Notta). On the server we had to wrap their api in a proxy so we could store annotations in Elastic etc. it was great in a lot of ways but a ton of work in other areas.<p>Generally how do you compare?<p>How are viewer modifications handled?<p>Great job getting the product out the door. This is a great space.
This looks like a fantastic solution. If there were an affordable price point, I would immediately implement this in the edtech platform that we're developing, but the price point puts it completely out of our league for now. (Especially given the exchange rate fluctuations we see as developers in South Africa). Have you by any chance considered offering discounts to:
1. Educational institutions
2. Startups (eg. us)
Offering a free tier to startups, or at a discounted rate would allow them to use the product and become entrenched, by which point the full license would become easily affordable.<p>Overall looks like a great solution, and definitely a gap in the market. On a side note, I hit the "Try for Free" button on the home page and got a 404.
COngrats Nick ! I've tested the fill pdf demo on latest FF on WIN10.<p>I cann add characters; but cannot remove them with DEL or RETURN keys cc <a href="https://ibb.co/zX4LQwL" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/zX4LQwL</a><p>Cheers
Hi Nick,<p>Your product looks pretty awesome. It's super polished for your initial launch! Congrats!<p>I'm curious how long it took to build the product and how large your team is? Do you have some initial customers?<p>I'm building a similar paid Javascript Library business (<a href="https://www.dropkiq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropkiq.com/</a>). I would love to connect if you want to share some ideas? Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested: adam@dropkiq.com<p>Adam
I almost feel like this should be a product that integrates with industry leading API's and be licensed as a better white label, then get those enterprises into maintenance contract. Lot of companies I have spoken to want to "own" the process all the way through and create a seamless "in their portal experience" for interacting with PDFS. (tagging/signing/SSO/workflow etc)