Overview

lightweight-pdf generates PDFs for recurring business documents – invoices, quotes, delivery notes, reports, certificates – in pure Rust. You describe a document with a builder API over a fixed set of layout primitives; the library paginates it and writes the PDF. The same code runs natively and as wasm32-unknown-unknown, for example inside a Cloudflare Worker.

The PDF writer (objects, xref, streams) and the TrueType subsetter are part of this repository. The only required third-party dependency is skrifa for font parsing; miniz_oxide for Flate compression is optional and on by default.

What it covers

• Layout primitives – text, rows, columns, tables, lists, images, lines, spacers, page breaks – with automatic, page-count-stable pagination, headers and footers, and a table of contents.
• Real Unicode text with embedded, subset fonts; Source Sans 3 is bundled.
• A versioned JSON document format and data-driven templates, plus the lwpdf command-line tool.
• A wasm build with JavaScript bindings, a Worker starter and a browser playground.
• PDF/A-3b, ZUGFeRD/Factur-X embedding and Tagged PDF/PDF-UA-1 behind Cargo features.

Where it stops

This is not a typesetting system and has no markup language. There is no way to hand it HTML/CSS or a full typesetting language and get a sensible result – a deliberate scope boundary. JSON documents are a serialisation format, not a template language: no scripting, conditions or expressions. See the comparison for how that plays out against other tools.

How the docs are organised

• Getting started: install the crate or the CLI and render a first document.
• Guides: layout, fonts, JSON and templates, the CLI, WASM and JavaScript, PDF/A, ZUGFeRD and PDF/UA and snapshot testing.
• Reference: Cargo features, workspace crates, comparison and development. Item-level API documentation lives on docs.rs.
• Architecture decisions: ADRs — full record of design choices, trade-offs, and constraints.