However, my only major issue with it was the difficulty (back then) for laying out PDFs. Most people I worked with found it a lot easier to layout in HTML/CSS and converting to PDF from there; so we went that way.
If I were to look for a way to manipulate existing PDFs I'd definitely use HexaPDF. I'll re-evaluate its (more recently) improved layout capabilities again and consider it for my next project. And I also think the dual-licensing model is fair.
Congrats on the 10-year/1.0 milestone.
> Normally one would need to pay ISO to get a standards document.
What is the point of a standard that is not pulicly available ?
"Developing, publishing and maintaining ISO standards incurs a cost, and revenues from selling them helps ISO and its members to cover an important part of these costs. Charging for standards allows us to ensure that they are developed in an impartial environment and therefore meet the needs of all stakeholders for which the standard is relevant. This is essential if standards are to remain effective in the real world."
I don't think the PDF standard was developed in an impartial environment.
I don't know if that's the explanation here (maybe there's good reasons for it?) but it's the first thing that came to mind.
Keep in mind that ISO traditionally dealt more with industrial standards; eg something like https://www.iso.org/standard/40447.html costs ~$180, but I doubt anyone who'd be attempting to compete in the "Apparatus for industrial gamma radiography" world would consider that expense as any more burdensome than buying office consumables.
Chop it down by a factor of 2-4, and the question still remains: is $250 significant compared to the amount of work you're going to have to do to be competitive in the PDF-document processing space?
(for quick hacks, reverse engineering is good enough. you only need the standard once you're processing enough client documents that you need to know all about the long tail of possible but unlikely constructs your code may encounter, after all)
ISO is the international standards organization. A software developer in Indonesia earns $500 per month. Half your salary for one document is indeed a lot.
How much is 500g emping for you all? From a swiss source it's $25. That might give us a rough idea of price differentials...
[This is all moot though, because the PDF standard is available gratis.]
Are there any examples of this? How do you monetize a DLL file? One time purchase and later upgrades?
It seems like you'd have to put it behind an API and charge for usage, though I don't have a good overview of what the other options are.
We paid on a per domain basis and also paid a yearly maintenance fee to get updates. Nothing stopped us from just using the library in ways that violated the license but we didn’t. The threat of lawsuit is an effective deterrent if the ethical concerns aren’t.
In my experience for B2B the people that are going to steal from you were never going to pay anyways.
Typo in the article word imported should be important.