[HN Gopher] 10 Years of HexaPDF
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10 Years of HexaPDF
Author : thunderbong
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-10-27 01:26 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gettalong.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (gettalong.org)
| 4silvertooth wrote:
| >Another thing that was imported to me was - and still is
|
| Typo in the article word imported should be important.
| gettalong wrote:
| Thanks and corrected!
| poulpy123 wrote:
| There is a side note that really shocked me:
|
| > Normally one would need to pay ISO to get a standards document.
|
| What is the point of a standard that is not pulicly available ?
| andai wrote:
| A lot of regulations exist largely to make it more difficult
| for individuals and small companies to compete.
|
| I don't know if that's the explanation here (maybe there's good
| reasons for it?) but it's the first thing that came to mind.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| According to https://www.iso.org/standard/51502.html the
| standard would cost ~$250, so basically 1 hour of dev time. I
| can't think of anything competitive I might do as an
| individual/SME in this space that would come in at under 2
| weeks, so compared to actually doing the work, paying for the
| standard would be in the noise.
|
| Keep in mind that ISO traditionally dealt more with
| industrial standards; eg something like
| https://www.iso.org/standard/40447.html costs ~$180, but I
| doubt anyone who'd be attempting to compete in the "Apparatus
| for industrial gamma radiography" world would consider that
| expense as any more burdensome than buying office
| consumables.
| andai wrote:
| One hour of dev time? Are you paid half a million a year?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I have been in the past; currently I consult part time,
| so that's both (a) fully burdened, and (b) not the rate
| I'd choose if I still wanted 1'800 hours/year.
|
| Chop it down by a factor of 2-4, and the question still
| remains: is $250 significant compared to the amount of
| work you're going to have to do to be competitive in the
| PDF-document processing space?
|
| (for quick hacks, reverse engineering is good enough. you
| only need _the_ standard once you 're processing enough
| client documents that you need to know all about the long
| tail of possible but unlikely constructs your code may
| encounter, after all)
| andai wrote:
| The answer is yes. It's a lot of money for what it is.
|
| ISO is the _international_ standards organization. A
| software developer in Indonesia earns $500 per month.
| Half your salary for one document is indeed a lot.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Wow. True; it probably doesn't help that ISO HQ is in
| Geneva.
|
| How much is 500g emping for you all? From a swiss source
| it's $25. That might give us a rough idea of price
| differentials...
|
| [This is all moot though, because the PDF standard is
| available gratis.]
| andai wrote:
| Also, could I ask for advice to increase my hourly rate?
| Mine is closer to $25. Granted I am in Europe, so the
| ceiling here will be quite different, but I'd love to
| hear how you did that!
|
| I hear (even for those based in US) that location plays a
| huge part, but even so, I assume specialization also
| played a big part?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Yes, specialisation over decades. Perhaps almost as
| important: I started in the US, and still work almost
| exclusively for US clients.
|
| In a world where I can work almost as easily 12 time
| zones away as 2, I'm not sure why these huge continental
| disparities still exist, but they do.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| https://www.iso.org/footer-links/frequently-asked-questions-...
|
| "Developing, publishing and maintaining ISO standards incurs a
| cost, and revenues from selling them helps ISO and its members
| to cover an important part of these costs. Charging for
| standards allows us to ensure that they are developed in an
| impartial environment and therefore meet the needs of all
| stakeholders for which the standard is relevant. This is
| essential if standards are to remain effective in the real
| world."
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Charging for standards allows us to ensure that they are
| developed in an impartial environment
|
| I don't think the PDF standard was developed in an impartial
| environment.
| dotancohen wrote:
| PDF? I'd agree about that "open" document format that MS
| Word use (the standard literally states that some things
| should be implemented "like MS Office does") but not PDF.
| aredox wrote:
| Here are the members of the ISO Technical Committee 171
| (ISO/TC 171), Document management application, Subcommittee
| SC 2 who is in charge of developing and updating PDF
| standards:
|
| https://www.iso.org/committee/53674.html?view=participation
| kjksf wrote:
| You should be able to see when someone is gaslighting you.
| They charge because they want and can.
|
| The above justification might apply to some of their
| standards but certainly not to PDF.
|
| PDF was developed by Adobe. They make lots money selling PDF
| tools and licensing PDF software.
|
| PDF didn't have to be a standard. It could be a proprietary
| format.
|
| Adobe wanted the adoption of PDF so they made PDF a standards
| so that they can sell more PDF tools.
|
| It didn't have to an ISO standard. Adobe could have released
| it as an open spec with some sort of permissive license.
|
| Adobe wanted it to be ISO standard to piggy back on
| "respectability" of International Standards Organization, to
| buy the impression that it's an open standard.
|
| But ISO makes money by selling standards so we ended up in
| this situation when the spec for "open" standard that Adobe
| wants to be adapted costs $100+ to buy.
|
| I guess Adobe at some point figured out this is stupid and
| made the spec available for free.
| andai wrote:
| >commercially available library
|
| Are there any examples of this? How do you monetize a DLL file?
| One time purchase and later upgrades?
|
| It seems like you'd have to put it behind an API and charge for
| usage, though I don't have a good overview of what the other
| options are.
| alemanek wrote:
| This used to be much more common. I worked on a product in 2004
| that licensed a library around providing a nice SDK for
| different payment processors. Effectively making it super
| simple to switch or route payments to different processing
| gateways.
|
| We paid on a per domain basis and also paid a yearly
| maintenance fee to get updates. Nothing stopped us from just
| using the library in ways that violated the license but we
| didn't. The threat of lawsuit is an effective deterrent if the
| ethical concerns aren't.
|
| In my experience for B2B the people that are going to steal
| from you were never going to pay anyways.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >In my experience for B2B the people that are going to steal
| from you were never going to pay anyways.
|
| I used to think that but eventually the evidence pointing to
| the opposite was overwhelming. It wasn't just small companies
| either, some of them you will have heard of.
| gettalong wrote:
| The library is dual-licensed as AGPL plus a commercial license.
| So everything is in the open and can be tested and tried out
| under the AGPL. Once the library is used in a commercial
| context, you nearly always need to buy the commercial licenses
| to stay compliant. This is how it generally works.
|
| What the commercial license does is a different thing. You
| could charge once OR once and for every upgrade to an
| (arbitrarily defined) new major version OR each year via a
| subscription OR ... It is really up to you and how you want to
| handle this.
| aidog wrote:
| Note: This is by the author of the popular kramdown markdown
| library.
| nona wrote:
| I looked at HexaPDF several years ago, and really liked what I
| saw.
|
| However, my only major issue with it was the difficulty (back
| then) for laying out PDFs. Most people I worked with found it a
| lot easier to layout in HTML/CSS and converting to PDF from
| there; so we went that way.
|
| If I were to look for a way to manipulate existing PDFs I'd
| definitely use HexaPDF. I'll re-evaluate its (more recently)
| improved layout capabilities again and consider it for my next
| project. And I also think the dual-licensing model is fair.
|
| Congrats on the 10-year/1.0 milestone.
| gettalong wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I agree that laying out PDFs could be made easier by using a
| declarative mechanism instead of coding. However, I'm still not
| sure what the best way would be to do that. Using HTML/CSS for
| this and doing it right would entail implementing something
| like PrinceXML...
|
| With the current layout model you have the possibility to
| implement price layouts, like the one needed by Swiss QR bills
| (see https://x.com/_gettalong/status/1748823670368117154), or
| just define the general layout and let HexaPDF decide the final
| position (see
| https://hexapdf.gettalong.org/examples/pdfa.html).
|
| If you have any ideas, how laying out PDFs could be made
| simpler, I'm all ears!
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