We’ve done some tests in that area and while Chromium is technically able to generate tagged PDFs, which would be accessible for the most part, it’s far from perfect.
We have some work planned in that direction, but nothing close to release at this stage.
You’re touching on a few different points so I’ll try to cover everything.
- We do build on top OSS (just not those programs you listed - see https://pspdfkit.com/legal/acknowledgements/processor-acknow... for a complete list). The layer we build is quite large though, and it would take many person-years to replicate in its entirety. It’s possible though that you don’t need that at all and a focused program that wraps other ones might do the trick for your use case.
- If you build a product based on our tech, you’re taking a conscious decision about risk: while I do think we’re gonna be in business in 10 years (we have solid revenue and last year we got backed by a large investor, Insight), that we would version APIs and support you (not just during upgrades), the reality is that it is indeed possible that we’re not gonna be around anymore, like every other company on the planet. As a consumer, this is the reality for most of the things we buy nowadays. We do take deprecation seriously, as sell SDKs, and I’m sure in case of the company shutting down you would have enough time to migrate.
- Depending on what you need to build, using our product may shortcut your development time by a large factor. It may not, if you just need to rotate pages of a PDF document and there’s a reliable OSS package that does that in your language of choice. It really depends on what you need to do.
- Even if you package everything with OSS, waiting 10 years is a sufficiently large amount of time that it may not work and you have to fork and rebuild yourself. It’s a different type of risk, but still a risk. 10 years ago Docker had just been launched. Whether you build something on OSS or commercial, you would wanna test things once a year to see if they still work or keep up with security and bug fixes.
Ultimately, there are situations where the approach you described is sound: for example, I do my taxes in plain text accounting, using ledger and emacs. I generate the reporting via a couple of Ruby scripts. I do that exactly because I care about longevity: I do my taxes once a year, I don’t wanna spend time fixing the toolchain every time I have to do them. Yet every year I hit a couple of snags I have to fix, but I consider that acceptable.
The volume you’re describing is totally doable. We can do custom plans if you’re interested - there’s a contact link at https://pspdfkit.com/api/pricing/.
Very valid concern around privacy. We don't store the documents (see https://pspdfkit.com/api/privacy/), but for people that have sensitive documents to process, we offer an on-prem product, see https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/deployment-options/. You can run it in your own infra and it doesn't report any telemetry to us, so information remains completely private.
You can create a PDF from scratch starting from HTML - see https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/developer-guides/pdf-.... Note that HTML generation has a few nice quality of life additions around headers/footers, logos and conversion of HTML forms to PDF forms, which are things that you don't normally get with the print to PDF workflow you would normally build from scratch.
Filling out forms is not supported, but I'll take a note. The engine can do it, but we haven't got it exposed via the API.
At this point in time the price is per generated document - irrespectively of how complicated the operation is.
Because you can combine operations in one http call, you're incentivised to do that as opposed to perform separate calls which increase the possibility of errors and cost for all sides.
Happily taking feedback though - your comment around hard-cap is definitely sound, for example.
1. It takes time and there's no way around that.
2. Accept you and your wife are both different people now. When loved ones die, you change. Part of the difficulty is to accept that you're a different person.
3. Live through your emotions, don't suppress them. It's ok to be affected by the most seemingly random things you see.
4. You don't have to talk about this all the time. It's ok to watch a movie to get a break.
5. Seek therapy - a professional can guide you through your feelings and help you making sense of them.
6. Routine helps - but don't lose yourself into what you do to hide from the pain.