PDF Import

The problem

Customers wanted to leave Miro and come to Lucid. Great! Except their work was still in Miro. Switching tools wasn't much good if they had to leave all of that behind.

The underlying document data was encrypted, and we couldn't get a usable document download. What we could get was a PDF. That was it. That's what we had to work with.

What I built

The CEO wanted this solved. Leadership pulled me off my team to take it on, and I felt honored. A really hard problem with a really clear reason to solve it. I love that kind of work.

Turns out PDFs are a bunch of drawing data. Line here. Line there. Clip path. Translate. Transform. It's instructions for drawing what you see, not the editable document behind it.

I built an importer that read those instructions and translated them into Lucid's document schema. Give it a PDF from Miro, get back a document you could actually keep working on in Lucid.

That translation was the hard part. A command that draws a line doesn't hand you the meaning of that line. I had to turn drawing instructions into something Lucid understood as a document. Incredibly challenging.

Outcome

Then we added a bulk import endpoint so customers could bring their documents over in bulk. That unlocked a handful of enterprise deals from teams making the switch.

They already wanted Lucid. Now they could bring their work with them. That's what made this so valuable—and one of my favorite problems I've gotten to solve.