For developers · Articles

Articles

Notes from building BroadPaper — the problems that turned out to be harder than they looked, and what we decided to do about them. Written by the person who wrote the code, usually posted to LinkedIn first and kept here so it has an address that outlives a feed.

• 21 September 2026 · Barry Mooring

  The page break you see is a guess: what I learned building an embeddable report designer Pagination nobody owns, bugs that produce a plausible document rather than a crash, and why the template being plain JSON turned out to matter most.

And the guides, which are a different thing

An article is what somebody thought on a particular day. A guide is a reference page about a problem, rewritten when it stops being true and carrying the date it was last checked. If you arrived here with a library to choose rather than an hour to read, start there.

• Building PDF reports with jsPDF The seven steps from a working receipt to a layout engine you did not mean to write, and where the line actually is.
• react-pdf vs an embedded report designer Two architectures, not two libraries. Who owns the layout is the whole question.
• Letting users design their own PDF reports in React Schema contracts, template storage, tenant isolation, versioning and where the PDF gets rendered.
• A drag-and-drop report designer in Angular Change detection, standalone components, lazy routes and the WebAssembly engine under Angular's bundler.
• Customer-editable PDF templates How to hand layout control to customers without handing them your data model or your release process.