DuckSlide: Building PDF Pipelines Sucks

The Hell We've All Been Through

At some point in your career, someone's going to walk up to you and say, "Hey, can we generate a couple of reports as PDFs for our customers?" And you think, "Sure, how hard can it be?"

Famous last words.

You start by Googling around. You find a myriad of packages. Some unmaintained, some with cryptic documentation, none of them quite doing what you need. So you roll your own pipeline:

1. User makes a request
2. You grab all the data from your database
3. You feed it to whatever solution you've concocted together. Maybe you're drawing nodes programmatically, or maybe you've spun up a headless Chromium browser to render HTML with Tailwind
4. You pray nothing breaks when the data comes in weird formats
5. It breaks anyway. Of course it does.

Now you're spending hours testing edge cases. What happens when the customer name is 200 characters? What if the address has line breaks? What if there are 500 line items instead of 5?

And that's just generation. Then you need to figure out delivery. You try returning the PDF immediately, but then a large dataset comes through and your API times out. So now you're building a queue system, setting up job processing, sending notifications, crafting emails…

You get it working. Eventually. Until the next project, where you do it all over again with slightly different requirements.

Look, I'm just going to say it: generating PDFs is one of those problems that feels like it should be solved by now. But it's not. And if you're a developer, you've been there.

What If You Didn't Have To?

That's why I built DuckSlide.

Here's the workflow:

1. Upload a template. Your design team made a beautiful PDF in Figma or Canva? Perfect. Use that.
2. Bench test your data. See exactly how your dynamic dataset will look before you ship it.
3. Hit our API. Generate PDFs with your real data, send them straight to customers, or listen to a webhook and handle it however you want.

No more node-drawing libraries. No more headless browsers timing out. No more surprise formatting issues at 2am.

Why I Built This?

As a fellow developer, I know this pain intimately. I've built these pipelines at every company I've worked at. Different tech stacks, different requirements, same fundamental problem.

This time, I decided to build DuckSlide so no other developer has to go through this nonsense again.

How It Actually Works?

The API is clean and straightforward. The kind you'd want to use:

import { DuckSlide } from '@duckslide/sdk';

const client = new DuckSlide({
  clientId: DUCKSLIDE_CLIENT_ID,
  apiKey: DUCKSLIDE_API_KEY,
});

const result = await client.presentations.generate({
  documentId: 'document123',
  fields: [
    { id: 'customer-name', type: 'text', value: 'John Doe' },
    { id: 'company-name', type: 'text', value: 'Acme Corp' },
    { id: 'proposal-date', type: 'text', value: '2025-01-15' },
    { id: 'welcome-msg', type: 'ai', prompt: 'Generate a professional greeting' },
    { id: 'logo', type: 'ai', prompt: 'Fetch logo from https://example.com' },
  ],
  delivery: {
    method: 'email',
    recipients: ['client@example.com'],
  },
});

That's it. No configuration hell, no dependency nightmares, no wondering why your PDF renderer hates Unicode.

Built for Scale

Whether you're generating 10 PDFs or 10 million, DuckSlide handles it. We built the infrastructure with global edge caching and automatic scaling because we've seen what happens when these systems buckle under load. We don't want you paged at 3am because your invoice generation died.

What's Coming?

We're in beta right now, working with select teams to make sure this actually solves the problem. Coming soon:

• Advanced template editor with visual field configuration (no more guessing pixel positions)
• Webhook support for real-time notifications
• Batch generation for when you need to churn out thousands of documents
• Template marketplace so you don't start from scratch

Join the Beta

If this resonates with you, if you've been through the PDF generation hell and never want to go back, we'd love to have you try DuckSlide.