Did you actually forget to add a PDF version of this post? 😝
Edit: Slightly more substantiative: A service like the one you've described will undoubtedly be extremely valuable in many situations. Though, I must say PDF Generation isn't half as bad as you make it out to be.
Admittedly, getting a PDF generator with custom bells and whistles up and running isn't exactly the most fun thing in the world, but the majority of free and open source tools such as Pandoc, PagedJS, PDFMake, jsPDF, PDFKit, numerous Python ones, etc. are perfectly capable of handling content flow and typesetting for you to varying degrees, and they run perfectly fine in all sorts of environments. And, as an added bonus, since these libraries as well as the PDF spec are mostly static, there's not a whole lot of maintenance to deal with either.
Whatever added value you add on top of this together with the ease of use that a managed service brings to the table, I have no doubt that you have the potential to make a lot of people's lives a whole lot easier, and I wish you the best of luck!
Did you actually forget to add a PDF version of this post? 😝
Edit: Slightly more substantiative: A service like the one you've described will undoubtedly be extremely valuable in many situations. Though, I must say PDF Generation isn't half as bad as you make it out to be.
Admittedly, getting a PDF generator with custom bells and whistles up and running isn't exactly the most fun thing in the world, but the majority of free and open source tools such as Pandoc, PagedJS, PDFMake, jsPDF, PDFKit, numerous Python ones, etc. are perfectly capable of handling content flow and typesetting for you to varying degrees, and they run perfectly fine in all sorts of environments. And, as an added bonus, since these libraries as well as the PDF spec are mostly static, there's not a whole lot of maintenance to deal with either.
Whatever added value you add on top of this together with the ease of use that a managed service brings to the table, I have no doubt that you have the potential to make a lot of people's lives a whole lot easier, and I wish you the best of luck!
If only there were an API to generate the PDF version 😉
After having given this a this a more thorough read, it looks like I sort of missed your primary value proposition oops!
Abstracting away end-user interaction is actually a very cool concept. It'll be interesting to see what this project evolves into.