For developers · Guides

Guides

Written for developers who are currently fighting this — PDF libraries that stop measuring at page two, layout requests arriving with a customer's name on them, and the architecture question underneath both. Each one says plainly where a simpler tool is the better answer.

• 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.

Writing of a different kind: the articles are dated, first-person pieces about building this — the problems that turned out to be harder than they looked, and what we decided to do.

And the product they are about

BroadPaper is an embeddable visual report designer for web applications. You declare the data your users may bind to; they design the document; the SDK owns layout, pagination, branding and a vector PDF.

• React report designer Mount the designer in a React app, bind it to your schemas, and get a template back as JSON.
• Angular report designer Standalone components that run outside Angular's zone, with a .NET render path when the back end is not JavaScript.
• Embedded report designer For multi-tenant products where every customer wants its own layout and its own branding.
• JavaScript report designer One framework-free mount call. Vue, Svelte, Lit or no framework at all.
• PDF template designer SDK What a BroadPaper template is, and why it is not a PDF with form fields in it.
• Compared with other tools jsPDF, react-pdf, pdfmake, Puppeteer and the other embedded designers — including when they win.