forme-pdf 0.7.13

A page-native PDF rendering engine. Layout INTO pages, not onto an infinite canvas.
Documentation

forme-pdf

A page-native PDF rendering engine written in Rust. Layout happens into pages, not onto an infinite canvas that gets sliced afterward — so page breaks, table headers, and flex layout all work correctly across pages.

cargo add forme-pdf installs the crate. The library name is forme:

use forme::{render_json, Document, FormeError};

Features

  • Page-native layout — flexbox, tables, and text reflow with real page boundary awareness
  • CSS-like styling — flexbox (row/column, wrap, grow/shrink), CSS Grid, absolute positioning
  • Text — OpenType shaping, Knuth-Plass line breaking, hyphenation (35+ languages), BiDi, per-character font fallback
  • Tables — automatic header repetition on page breaks, column spans
  • Images — JPEG, PNG, WebP (embedded or data URI)
  • SVG — inline SVG rendering (rect, circle, line, path, arc)
  • Charts — BarChart, LineChart, PieChart, AreaChart, DotPlot (engine-native, no JS)
  • QR codes & barcodes — vector rendering (Code128, Code39, EAN13, EAN8, Codabar)
  • Canvas — arbitrary vector drawing via a Canvas-like API
  • Watermarks — rotated text behind page content
  • Tagged PDF / PDF/A-2a — accessibility and archival compliance
  • Templates — expression language for dynamic documents ($ref, $each, $if)
  • WASM — compiles to WebAssembly for browser and serverless use

Quick start

use forme::{render_json, FormeError};

fn main() -> Result<(), FormeError> {
    let json = r#"{
        "pages": [{ "size": "A4" }],
        "children": [{
            "kind": "text",
            "content": "Hello from Forme!",
            "style": { "fontSize": 24, "margin": { "top": 72, "left": 72 } }
        }]
    }"#;

    let pdf_bytes = render_json(json)?;
    std::fs::write("hello.pdf", pdf_bytes).unwrap();
    Ok(())
}

API

Function Description
render(&Document) Render a document struct to PDF bytes
render_json(&str) Parse JSON and render to PDF bytes
render_with_layout(&Document) Render and return layout metadata
render_template(&str, &str) Evaluate a template with data, then render

All functions return Result<Vec<u8>, FormeError> (or a tuple with LayoutInfo for the _with_layout variants).

Documentation

  • Full docs — component reference, styling guide, examples
  • API reference — Rust API docs
  • GitHub — source, issues, JSX/TypeScript packages

License

MIT