Show HN: I built Creodocs, a document creation platform based on LaTeX

Hi all, sole developer here! Creodocs has been over 6 years of work in my spare time and it&#x27;s great to finally launch it!<p>The idea for Creodocs came about after I launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LaTeXTemplates.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LaTeXTemplates.com</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LaTeXTypesetting.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LaTeXTypesetting.com</a> in 2012 and 2013, respectively. I noticed that academic documents and books consist almost entirely of content that changes across multiple instances of the template used to make them, but business documents are much more likely to consist of large proportions of static content. Think of receipts you receive from an online retailer; that company&#x27;s information, branding and layout of the document doesn&#x27;t change at all, but your account number, name, address and items purchased change.<p>I thought, well, what if I use the power of LaTeX to create virtually any design imaginable (combined with the ability to do math, use variables, etc), but abstract away the code (which is hard to master and archaic by modern standards), to allow users to specify just those dynamic parts of a document they need to fill out and keep the rest unchangeable.<p>Enter Creodocs, a document creation platform with a collection of templates available to all users, and the ability to add your own via a LaTeX template with variables specified. Variables each accept specific content types (int, bool, string, float) with a maximum length. Private templates can be shared with others, and there are billing groups to manage spending centrally. The idea is that a small&#x2F;medium business would create (or have me create) a set of templates for documents they constantly produce, and then each of their staff (who don&#x27;t know what LaTeX is) can log in and simply fill out a web form and get a consistent beautiful PDF document immediately. There is also the ability to create hundreds or thousands of documents at once using a spreadsheet, or create documents via an API without touching the website at all.<p>I&#x27;d love some feedback on the idea and implementation! At this stage, if you&#x27;re interested in using it for your business, send me an email and you&#x27;re welcome to use it all you want for free if I can get some feedback.<p>I&#x27;m also happy to chat about how the LaTeX world has changed in the last 10 years, or about how I&#x27;ve managed to have a steady stream of commercial clients willing to pay me to create custom LaTeX templates through my typesetting service.

Just tried your product.<p>1. You have no way of previewing your entered data - if you mess up, you just wasted 0.05 - 0.12 USD. Does it really cost that much to render a PDF once? With Overleaf, you get essentially unlimited previews. Consider providing a watermarked preview, or a lowly-res png render.<p>2. Why do the credits expire? As a casual user, I&#x27;d need to buy credits either again and again, or pay more than double the price so I can just use my credits. I think that&#x27;s really unfair, and coupled with your pricing model above is limiting my interaction severely.<p>3. However, as a technically adept customer I like how it&#x27;s done now. I can create as many free accounts as I like, each with about 7 USD worth of credits. I just need to set up a spam account every time I run out.<p>## Alternative model: ##<p>- Unlock templates by paying for them. All generation is then free (up to a certain high limit for your enterprise customers and limit abuse).<p>- Provide packages of templates to buy together (the finance department package, the communication package, ...) - For an even higher licensing fee, the templates can be downloaded as well and integrated into products.<p>I think this would suit your existing business of providing custom LaTeX templates well.<p>## Alternative model 2: ##<p>1. Bog standard subscription (pay x per month to do y pdfs)<p>## Security: ##<p>The rendered LaTeX may include files such as &#x2F;etc&#x2F;passwd. I did not try to get an RCE on your rendering server, but I&#x27;d spend some time isolating it as much as possible. Consider getting a pentest done, especially given your high privacy claims.

This is awesome! Your monetization scheme is abhorrent!<p>That&#x27;s at least my first two reactions upon seeing this. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, this idea is something I&#x27;ve wanted for a long, long time. Holy cow though, talk about a dark pattern: your credits method (and their 60 day expiry) has completely soured this experience for me out of the gate. I&#x27;m not going to sign up for a platform that continues to nudge me down a waterslide towards my wallet. Seriously, I&#x27;d probably rather have a subscription model for something of this caliber. If you want to attract a business crowd, you shouldn&#x27;t implement a pay-as-you-go model. These companies want to integrate you into their SAAS stack and consider you a fixed-rate expenditure, not constantly worry about budgeting you into a part of their payroll.

There&#x27;s a lot of good discussion on the pricing model, and I agree that its a bit too complicated even though there are no bad intentions here.<p>Would you consider a combination of dollar balance, and membership ?<p>The membership cost itself would be a simple base price like $5. Its like the cost of a Costco membership. That helps keep the lights and manage some fixed costs.<p>While the dollar balance is used to create documents. To offer bulk-buyer discounts, you could consider discounting cost of dollar balances, for example $100 dollar balance costs $90.

Hello from a fellow LaTeX enthusiast.<p>Out of curiosity, how do you handle external assets (e.g., images [1])?<p>Extending the retailer example - suppose such company would further like to include a thumbnail for each product in a receipt. Or, extending the inspection example included in the support section, suppose the sender wishes to include a blueprint or an external document. How should they proceed?<p>Some questions in anticipation. What if it is not possible to store the whole catalog locally for a given receipt template? What if catalog items are regarded as sensitive information for the company?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;5433&#x2F;can-i-use-an-image-located-on-the-web-in-a-latex-document" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;5433&#x2F;can-i-use-an-im...</a>

It&#x27;s a fantastic idea, but the landing page is more complicated than it needs to be.<p>I suggest embedding a demo video of someone using the product. A 30-45 second video ideally.<p>Make the page about the product, being as upfront as possible. This is the product, this is what it does, this is how you can access it.<p>For example, the way Apple does it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;iphone-12&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;iphone-12&#x2F;</a> ... First thing you see is the product itself... then what it does, then how you can buy it (Apple used to be better at making these pages btw).

Perhaps consider choosing background and font colors with a little more contrast? A white background and light grey text isn&#x27;t the easiest on the eyes (mine at least).

Hi Vel! LaTeX enthusiast from London here, currently making my way through Lamport&#x27;s Document Preparation System and The TeXbook. So much I didn&#x27;t know! I would love to hear how you<p>&gt; managed to have a steady stream of commercial clients willing to pay me to create custom LaTeX templates through my typesetting service.<p>If you don&#x27;t mind!

1. Your pricing scheme is scary. Hard pass 2. To create a template, the user needs to know LaTeX. That severely restricts your user base. 3. What advantage do you have over &quot;mail merge&quot; in Google docs or Word?

From one creator to another, intended to be constructive:<p>* I need to see samples on the homepage (I know what LaTeX is capable of but many don&#x27;t and it would be nice to see what I&#x27;ll get)<p>* I am not signing up just to test it, too much friction.

The homepage has quite a few bugs which makes reading on mobile hard. I assume it’s breaking point related for some blocks. I’m on latest iPhone Pro Max with Chrome. Will check it out in desktop later :)

Would be nice to understand what editing&#x2F;typing is like from the page. Is this some html forms that fills out and renders latex templates? I can see how that could be useful.

Why would I ever use this over overleaf?