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:

• [x] 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]

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

Next Steps

• [x] 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