Show HN: SnazzyPDF – Convert Any JSON Data to Beautifully Formatted PDFs

I think this is great but you might need to think about your point of difference. I suspect you have a product here but it might need some refining.

I asked Claude to create me something to do this. It worked first go.

import json from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Table, TableStyle, Paragraph from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet from reportlab.lib import colors

def create_pdf_from_json(json_file, pdf_file): # Read JSON data with open(json_file, 'r') as file: data = json.load(file)

    # Create PDF document
    doc = SimpleDocTemplate(pdf_file, pagesize=letter)
    elements = []

    # Add title
    styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
    elements.append(Paragraph("JSON Data Report", styles['Title']))
    elements.append(Paragraph("\n", styles['Normal']))

    # Create table data
    table_data = [["Key", "Value"]]
    for key, value in data.items():
        table_data.append([str(key), str(value)])

    # Create table
    table = Table(table_data, colWidths=[200, 300])
    table.setStyle(TableStyle([
        ('BACKGROUND', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.grey),
        ('TEXTCOLOR', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.whitesmoke),
        ('ALIGN', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 'CENTER'),
        ('FONTNAME', (0, 0), (-1, 0), 'Helvetica-Bold'),
        ('FONTSIZE', (0, 0), (-1, 0), 14),
        ('BOTTOMPADDING', (0, 0), (-1, 0), 12),
        ('BACKGROUND', (0, 1), (-1, -1), colors.beige),
        ('TEXTCOLOR', (0, 1), (-1, -1), colors.black),
        ('ALIGN', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 'CENTER'),
        ('FONTNAME', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 'Helvetica'),
        ('FONTSIZE', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 12),
        ('TOPPADDING', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 6),
        ('BOTTOMPADDING', (0, 1), (-1, -1), 6),
        ('GRID', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 1, colors.black)
    ]))

    elements.append(table)

    # Build PDF
    doc.build(elements)

if __name__ == "__main__": create_pdf_from_json("input.json", "output.pdf")

Neat but as others are saying this is for a technical audience and there is a lot of other options for this.

I could see some devs opting to use an open source software version and electing to host with your cloud hosting when devs do not want to bother keeping it securely hosted.

Small market though. Better to create a bunch of freemium sites to help normies do things with pdfs like convert them to docx or other image types… normies pay a fee to do a bunch of them, a big one, or to unlock a password protected one…

I checked it out and it looks quite cool. I’m curious what the use cases for this are beyond invoice generation?

Is there any agpl compatible Python library or a product that creates PDF from json like this but has a wyswig PDF layout editor, like an invoice format builder ?

Looks nice, well done.

Though I worry about the narrowness and "whip-up-ability" for the price and target market. It's a small enough featureset in a domain that skews technical, many would be inclined to template an HTML table to wkhtml2pdf and call it a day. Maybe they'd open source it after. I suppose you're aiming for the people who wouldn't do that, but would still expend the effort of integrating with an external HTTP API (and paying monthly for it)

I know a measure of a project's usefulness is "if a HN commenter says they could make it in a weekend but haven't, you've got something!", so maybe I'm wrong.

P.s. 50 pages / 1Mb per PDF is ludicrously far too small for a business tier.