Our service has built in charts support. Check out Pagify and let me if it is something you will use?

Thanks. Do you think by using an HTML template that can be filled in later is a better idea than visual designer?

The visual designer is great, it adds back in the ability for the designer to alter the template without the developer having to change any code. If this was a standalone product the template format would most likely need to be a proprietary format anyway for some basic piracy protection.

Thanks we will start looking for its uses as a stand alone product.

Thanks for the feedback. We are going after the SF market, but there is already competition. As far as pricing model is concerned we would do that on the no of pages one generates. Do you think developers are not the right market? Can we offer it to developers in some form?

PDF generation is a complex business... you're not going to be all things to all people, you need to choose a particular niche (at least to start with) and make that work. I can see the value prop in report generation on SF. "PDF Generation for developers" is too broad: I don't think you can do it (because there are so many different types of of PDFs to generate) and I can't see the value prop (because it's going to cost you more to provide a generic PDF generation service than it will cost me to use an existing library.)

That said, there might be a market there for developers, but you'll need to identify a very particular challenge that devs have and provide a much better solution than what they can achieve with a library in a day.

It does print the web page. But when it comes to print-friendly reports and quotes you need some library or print ready web page. So we allow developers to create a template that is print ready. And then using an API call they can merge data and generate PDF.

We are looking into dynamic layout where tables can be split. It would be great to work along side you. Can I have your contact?

Oh man, if you can solve it for me, I will be eternally grateful. You can email me at ashok (at) reportgarden (dot) com

Yes it will. Can we talk more about it?

So I could send it www.google.com and it would return a .pdf of google.com, exactly as it would look in the browser?

Sorry I must have misunderstood. That is what HTML2PDF engines do. We generate PDFs using our own templates.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear. I'm looking for a service that will do HTML2PDF from an API call.

HTML2PDFAAS, as I like to call it :)

Help us understand PDF generation and its problems.

What are your thoughts on Amazon like security scheme? As far as there are no third party apps involved, I think OAuth is an overkill.

What I mean by Amazon like securtiy is described in this article http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest-api-with...

Stormpath's custom scheme is very similar to Amazon's.

But per the blog article, you'd only want to do this if you are willing to support client libraries/sdks that implement it as well. No one wants to spend the time to implement non-standard custom HMAC algorithms.

We tried this with Pagify http://pagify.io And I think supporting client libraries was not an issue, since we had to provide SDK one way or the other.

Totally agree. The key here is that you're doing the work to implement the algorithms, not your customers. If they had to do it, they probably just wouldn't use it.

Thanks for the pointer, I was looking for a sane explanation of the Amazon security and signature algorithm.

I have to disagree with the other comments here regarding the client library. I think that given the precedence of Amazon API, given that people understand how to sign APIs like amazon, this method will be accepted even without a client library.

Being a Java / Scala dev, I prefer that an API provider allow me to select the HTTP client libraries to use and prevent from forcing me to use a specific library & version via SDK transitive dependencies.

I would say its practice than quantity that gets you to perfection. Producing quantity without learning through that process won't get you to that quality or perfection.

True. Practicing only makes sense when you learn from it.

Tutorials are good for beginners, but with experience a developer should be able to follow the annotated (auto- generated) documentation.

I use ruby, and for many gems there are no real tutorials, except for a short introduction on their usage. And I think even then it is pretty easy to follow the annotated-docs.