Ask HN: Have you built internal tools to generate complex PDFs?

1 haesunshine 5 4/25/2025, 3:26:10 PM

I’m working on a modular doc engine for generating complex PDFs; think insurance policy docs, contracts, compliance forms.

We’ve spoken with insurtech teams dealing with template sprawl from manual copy-paste, PDF logic buried in code that eng teams have to maintain.

If you’ve dealt with this in the past: what did you build? What failed? What would have helped?

Would love your thoughts: https://sutro.one

Comments (5)

zarekr · 4d ago

Typst is really good for this. The syntax takes a little bit of getting used to but on the whole I’ve had a lot of success producing contracts and other legal documents with it. I tend to assemble the input files using a templating engine and then use the compiler in a subprocess. The compiler is very fast and the development is pretty active. The output is much easier to manage than with packages like reportlab.

pestatije · 6d ago

the search term you need is "reporting tool", of which there are zillions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reporting_software

haesunshine · 6d ago

Thanks for your thoughts

dClauzel · 6d ago

Generating a XeLaTeX source document, then compiling it to produce the PDF.

haesunshine · 6d ago

I see. Would you be open to sharing which industry you worked in?

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Ask HN: Have you built internal tools to generate complex PDFs?

Comments (5)