PDF Generation Service

[techsavvyash]

Description

PDF Creation microservice.

Research around how can we go about generating PDFs.
examples:

1. Sending in HTML templates using HBS, EJS etc. templating engines.
2. .... figure out what can be other ways

2 Parts:

1. Generating PDFs/Implementation of the generation techniques-- customizable (support multiple templating engines,

We should also have support for bulk PDF generation.
Ideally this should be a JSON based config where where in we send the information using a spec (basically the content + template) and then get bulk links of uploaded PDFs back.

The response should also support streaming raw PDFs instead of uploaded links

Future scope

• Add an SDK to it
• Add a CLI to it
• Add a frontend where the user can visually modify the template and generate PDFs

[techsavvyash]

References:

• https://github.com/techsavvyash/c4gt-bff/blob/master/src/rcw/rcw.service.ts this link has a very crude implementation of templating engine based PDF generation, these needs to be fine-tuned and implemented in a robust fashion with test cases.

[drohan2536]

Research Doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nz_66YwG3RJwO_X3Xb-jEwr1rAyNgNUF1mPixLJFU2c/edit

[techsavvyash]

Current update:

• able to generate PDFs using template

Next Steps:

• Check for robustness
  • tables etc, and other tags
  • CSS
  • multiple pages
  • unicode characters - languages like hindi, chinese, odia, japanese etc. etc.
• Benchmark timings
• Compare tools with respect to timings

Features

• Template based PDF generation
• Template saving
• end point for generation with the body as JSON of information and templateID
• ensure scaling
  • Make sure it is fast
    • Research around market standard times
• API for bulk generation in batches
• Can respond with a link to a storage service (minIO by default)
• can send application/pdf as a HTTP response
• Have support to send PDFs as emails etc.
• Maybe add support for multiple other templating engine or frontend frameworks like htmx, vue, svelte, astro etc.

[techsavvyash]

• bulk generation
• JSON data support
• CSV support
• 4s for 50 PDFs

Next Steps

• Convert to TS
• Convert manual things to test cases -- figure out a way to test the generated PDF for correctness

[shivankurchavan]

https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg

tool for converting html to pdfs
has no support for html templates

[shivankurchavan]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OHMoig_5YdWqysAK0tur3IUsEUHzUbDY0KRF75BZOuM/edit

document for tracking service development