New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Replacing PDF Catalogue with just digital?

Ask HN: Replacing PDF Catalogue with just digital?
2 by napbree | 1 comments on Hacker News.
We've had a challenge asked of us. Re-creating a PDF Catalogue that has around 530 pages (about 1300 products) into a digital form. Logic being they have to pay and spend a lot of time to create a PDF and then a digital version (basically a PDF Viewer which has some interactivity) and then reformat the data to import the product into an ordering tool. By consolidating these steps, we could import it into the ordering tool (or a pre-processor which runs along side the ordering tool) and "spit out" the relevant versions. However, I don't think it's realistic to generate a PDF version programmatically, so we may still have to setup a PDF generated via data using InDesign (not a disaster) but then we have the challenge of recreating a digital catalogue on the web. They can't lose the ability to print the "digital catalogue" which restricts us, I believe. Any ideas / anyone seen anything in the wild that works well? EDIT: Worth saying, the ordering tool is built in NET Core.

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