printer

Style your documents deterministically.

Features

• Fearless styling: Style once and forget about it ever breaking.
• Version control: Supercharge your documents with Git; know what changed when and why!
• Mass production: Automate building repetitive documents using the JSON API.
• Presets (WIP): Same you, different look? Create new styles without losing old ones.

Purpose

This project isn't meant to be used out of the box; instead, this project provides an infrastructure for compiling custom data and pre-defined designs into HTML/PDF conveniently. The idea is that you define the designs and data formats and utilise the conversion structure provided by this project.

Usage

1. Clone this repository.
2. Run nix develop within this project's directory to install our build dependencies.
3. Run npm install to install our package dependencies.

Using the CLI

1. Rename src/*/data.nix.example to src/*/data.nix and populate it with the necessary information.
2. Run just to see the available command options.
   • build <design>: Build the PDF choosing a design.
   • watch <design>: Watch the build. As you change files, the PDF will regenerate automatically.
3. View your generated PDF at dist/output.pdf.

Note To use TailwindCSS, set USE_TAILWINDCSS to 1. To use a different file location, set INPUT_FILE_PATH.

Using the API

1. Run npm run dev for local hosting and npm run start for production hosting.
2. The API routes are as follows:
   • POST <url>/pdf?target=<design>:
     • design must match the exact folder name that you have stored for your design.
     • The body must be formatted as such:

       {
         "options": { "tailwindcss": true },
         "data": {}
       }
       

   • POST <url>/html?target=<design>: The rules are the same as the PDF endpoint.

Developing your own designs

Setup the project? Good. Here's what you need to know to kick-start developing your own designs:

• The directory where you will be creating your design(s) is src/<design>.

• Within this directory, you must create a page.svelte file. This is the entry point of your design. From here, you can either expand to multiple .svelte files via imports or stick to one, it's up to you.

  • For importing the data into your page.svelte file, export a variable named data (see other designs for reference)
  • If you want to use TailwindCSS for styling, please see how to enable compiling TailwindCSS below.

• Once you've created your design, you have 2 options to feed it data.

  1. Using the CLI
  2. By running the server and calling the relevant API endpoints.

  I recommend that you use option 1 for non-automated use cases, and option 2 for automated ones.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to @maan2003 for sharing his experience with building PDFs out of plaintext which helped kick-start this project!