Show HN: Papermill Press – An AI-friendly markup language for PDF generation
11 pointsby davidpapermill4 hours ago9 comments
  • jonnyburchan hour ago
    This looks cool - I’ve been building pdf rendering for agents this year and styling is such a pain. I’ll check it out
  • davidpapermill4 hours ago
    Hi Folks - I'm David, CEO of Papermill. We're super excited to get feedback on what we're building. This is the first time we've posted to a forum. Designing a document language for AI is a major undertaking and we'd love to hear from folks with experience and interest in document languages and generation.
  • tomfitzsimmons3 hours ago
    I'd love to see something like this in chatgpt or claude. The PDFs you can generate there are always so boring.
    • davidpapermill3 hours ago
      Thanks Tom, good to see you on HN! You can connect Papermill to your favourite agent via MCP - we prefer Claude Code.

      https://docs.papermill.io/mcp/#using-the-papermill-mcp-serve...

      You can ask Claude to generate templates, full documents, ask it about the Press language, save templates, ask it about templates and more. There's a lot more to it - design guidelines for print vs web, recipes in Press etc.

      I've tried it with Fable already and it's a noticeable improvement - we support visual feedback through MCP and I think that's helping Fable a lot.

    • tompapermill3 hours ago
      Hi Tom,

      One of the things we've learned is that models often need more guidance when generating documents. We give real-time feedback to models as they're constructing the document, such as "you have content here that you've done nothing with and doesn't appear in the report as it likely overflowed off the page, you should think of a way to handle this" and "this image is sized incorrectly and just will not fit in the area you've specified".

      Giving models the tools to create media for print allows both the user and the model to experiment with more wild designs, knowing that things will not randomly break!

  • frantzalot3 hours ago
    As a solicitor myself managing a high street law firm that is already comfortable drafting, reviewing, and producing client-ready PDFs from Word, where is the return on investment in adopting Press? What can Press do that cannot be achieved with Word and existing document automation tools?”
    • davidpapermill3 hours ago
      Papermill is more the "infrastructure" layer that sits below legal AI tools - we don't work directly with law firms, rather more likely to be used by a startup building a legal tool. Companies like Wordsmith, Legatics, Legora, Harvey can use Papermill to output high-quality PDFs.

      That said, an export from Word to Papermill templates might be a nice addition...

  • tompapermill4 hours ago
    Hi, Tom here. I'm happy to answer any questions r.e., generating PDFs, better ways of making automated document workflows more robust, or anything related to Papermill and Press!
  • Ste_CreaTech4 hours ago
    I'm excited to see more about how Papermill and Press can interact with agents in agentic workflows! This seems like a great problem solved in AI-first startups.
    • davidpapermill3 hours ago
      Press is designed from the ground-up for agentic workflows. We spoke to hundreds of companies generating PDFs before we designed the language, and had been building AI design systems ourselves for a few years.

      You can connect an agent to our MCP server, see: https://docs.papermill.io/mcp/#using-the-papermill-mcp-serve...

      It's quite amazing to see what Claude can do when it has a tool like Papermill at its disposal - worth connecting and having a play.

      In practice, you can either directly connect an LLM to the MCP server, or send via the API after (say) cleaning up LLM output, combining it with RAG and other data etc.

      • Ste_CreaTech2 hours ago
        Yep, I've been experimenting today!
        • davidpapermill2 hours ago
          Great! I’ll be posting videos on social media of MCP use over the next few weeks. Be sure to follow @papermillapp and keep an eye on our blog.
    • tompapermill4 hours ago
      Thanks Ste, we're happy to answer any questions you've got!
  • off_by_two3 hours ago
    Looks interesting. Are there any limits on the file size or length of pages that can be produced?
    • tompapermill3 hours ago
      Hi off_by_two

      We don't apply hard limits on PDFs. We've handled PDFs of over 1GB and close to 1000 pages.

      We also have a large document service that handles extremely large PDFs in the background.

      • davidpapermill3 hours ago
        Worth adding that we also support the integration of many PDFs into a large document, including complex processing, but this is not part of the publicly accessible Press language (yet).
  • lmartinneuwave3 hours ago
    looks great dave! loved the product. Hope it all goes well.
  • tim_at_ping4 hours ago
    V cool. Glad to see another Manchester based start up!
    • davidpapermill4 hours ago
      Thanks Tim! Great to see Byteful doing so well too!
    • Ste_CreaTech4 hours ago
      Byteful seems cool! WEb proxy stuff is important for me in my near future so I may just check you out. Thanks for commenting!