Germans do use the word 'handy' when referring to a mobile phone.
To us, 'handy' sounds like it could be the actual English word for mobile phone. When we hear 'public viewing' we think of people watching soccer together outdoor on a big screen. And I guess that most of us first think of a laptop computer when we hear the word 'notebook'.
Take a LibreOffice/OpenOffice document as your template and send a simple http request with the values you want to replace (with support for images and what you call 'repeatable parts'). The system will then return a link where you can pick up your generated pdf.
I find it very useful to have an environment/toolchain that allows for quick validation of assumptions. Just something where I can quickly drop some code to see if it does what I think it does. If I get more comfortable, I start to write tests. For some stuff it helps me to put the hight level concept on paper in a flowchart or diagram.
Run some code formatter over the source if you get angry about indentation or other stuff that works you up.
Don't underestimate the human behind the old code. It might look wild to you, but the other coder had probably something in mind. :)
EDIT: about the fighting: Make peace with the code. You can't time travel away the problems. For me, I need to constantly adjust my mental attitude towards unfamiliar code. Sometimes that even helps a bit.
If you know JSON, you probably are somehow my target audience.
Imagine you could take your normal Word document and just put in some placeholders. Then send some JSON and this Word document (as a template) to my service. You would get a PDF in return.
Instead of MS-Word documents I use OpenOffice documents as templates.
OpenOffice is a word processor like MS-Word. Also a nice user interface etc. it is just build with different goals in mind.
That's a good point though. Could you handle .docx files? I bet a lot of your potential users (the managers more than the developers) would be in the same boat: use MS Word every day, but never heard of LibreOffice. Even though they could obviously install it and convert their template doc from Word, that adds a lot of friction.
Not in a way that an end user would not be frustrated at some point. I could read those files, but the output could be too different from what an end user would expect.
You are not the first one to ask about doing this in/for Microsoft land.. I'm working on this. If you drop me a mail, I would come back to you once there is something to see.
> A professional quote done before the end of the meeting.
I have actually some code ready that takes templates, generates forms out of them (even for offline mobile use) and uses template2pdf as backend.
But explaining that in a short message is hard for me. So there is no website or good documentation on that yet. This will change very soon.
That is a fantastic use case that is easy to understand and explain.
> Try to find a way of showing the template/input without it being a download.
I've tried to gimp up a nice graphic several times. I will ask a friend to help me with that. This is actually something I wanted from the beginning but never had the time/energy to finish. It just never looked good and raised more questions than it tried to answer.
Having some more pre-designed templates is also a good idea. This might not attract the right audience via search engines, but could be of real value to potential customers. (And value for non potential customers.. which is also nice.)
That offline feature will be VERY important. I know a LOT of companies are looking for solutions to inputting data reliably on mobile devices when there is no connectivity. It's critical to maintaining a professional appearance, it's a very important feature!
I think showing some different invoice designs helps visitors get to the 'ohhh this is aimed at me' moment a lot sooner.
So if you have a mockup of a real estate invoice or a photographer's quote, perhaps a pharma rep pro forma, seeing industries listed are what helps people to identify themselves as a potential customer.
After all most visitors arrive at a site with the mindset of 'this might be something not applicable to me / my business' that's when they look for anchor points :- industry references, technical jargon, credibility from recognisable brands in their field. As soon as they see something familiar, they are like, 'ok, this is something I should pay attention to'
Do whatever you can to tell your target market 'you, yes YOU are my ideal customer'
About https. I am ashamed that I've not yet purchased a recognized certificate. There should be a self signed certificate running, but since I did not set up my own CA, this is not really ready for production. The example code in the documentation does not verify the ssl endpoint. I need to fix that..
How do others handle this?
I wanted to buy a signature from a CA that is recognized by the majority of browsers and build my own CA for the API.
btw, StartSSL offers free SSL certs that work with most browsers.
If something goes wrong then StartSSL revocation is not free but as the revocation system is pretty broken anyways u might not care, see [1] for details, if interested.
I'd use a recognized CA also for the API (smth recognized by all supported language SDKs). It can be a trouble to guide users through adding your CA as trusted CA for each case. Python, Java etc look up certs with a different strategy/have different CA truststores. For me namecheap has been one of the best offers for cheap SSL certs when StartSSL becomes too inflexible [2] or is not supported widely enough [3].
[2] Each free StartSSL domain can have exactly one alternate domain name, so you can have one cert with both template2pdf.com and www.template2pdf.com OR template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com OR www.template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com.
[3] AFAIK at least java 6 & 7 does NOT ship with StartSSL CA included in truststore.
You can. Please provide the source, I'm not aware of such constraint.
EDIT: The marketing speech that is often used to claim that more expensive certs are for more serious business is mostly baseless. Yes, you can pay to have your identity checked more carefully and pay even more to get the extended validation and a green bar, but this is "eye-candy" for most cases.
quote: Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server
certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature, when using high-profile brands and names or if involved in obtaining or relaying sensitive information such as health records, financial details, personal information etc.
They certainly had issues with issuing cert for domain name suggesting it is doing financial operations, but otherwise so far every purely commercial-nature domains successfully granted certs in my case. But obviously it is startssl call and they might change their mind anytime.
