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

[haesunshine]

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

[zarekr]

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]

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

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

[haesunshine]

Thanks for your thoughts

[dClauzel]

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

[haesunshine]

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