In fact their open source library, https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf, seems like a higher-level library that sits above react-pdf. Reminds me a lot of the set of react-pdf based components I built for a corporate job where letting users create PDFs was a huge part of the value proposition.
They're solving a really cool problem, actually, because building out into certain difficult use cases like SVG support was a huge pain.
Your second point is very interesting, seems like some kind of .assert('text').isVisible() API. We may want to dig into that further!
Cool project btw, congrats for the launch!
WHen dealing with layouts and assurance, I would go way out to verify as close to print as possible.
there's also a discussion about color to black/grayscale printing where you want a document to stay in character at grayscale.
these would be premium features I'd think.
Overall you're right that color correction is another area where you could probably command a premium.
As far as I know, there's no way to currently get colors adhering to print color profiles in CMYK out of browsers.
Indeed, if color correctness isn't mission critical, I can imagine that going with Paged.js can be a nice experience!
(Edit: in my experience so far, it's been really really hard to 'correct' colors from an existing PDF in a way that gets a satisfying end result---the colors are usually muted/washed out)
You're right - although many of the building blocks are there, it appears there is no way to specify a colorspace or print profile when asking Chrome to emit a PDF (and I doubt the other browsers are any better). Skia (the PDF rendering engine that Chromium uses) actually supports colorspace transforms, but Chromium doesn't seem to hook that up to CSS or even support non-RGBA colors in its rendering pipeline.
That forms a solid foundation that I find it hard to imagine paying for. The things where you might still command a premium are basically safety mechanisms/CI checks/library components that ensure the PDF renders correctly in the presence of variable-length content, etc. as well as maybe PDF-specific features like metadata and fillable forms. Naive ways to format headers, footers, tables/grids/flexboxes etc. often fail in PDFs because of unexpected layout complications. So having a methodology, process, and validation system for ensuring that a mission critical piece of information appears on a PDF in the presence of these constraints could be attractive.