Documentation Guides
Hands-on guides covering installation, architecture, accessibility, and common questions. For the full API surface, see the API reference in the README.
- Quick Start → Install pdfnative and generate your first PDF in Node.js or the browser in under a minute.
- Architecture → Two builders, generation pipeline, module dependency flow, and key design decisions.
- FAQ → Custom fonts, PDF/A variants, encryption, BiDi, browser/Deno/Bun, signatures, workers, and comparison with other libraries.
- Troubleshooting → Fixes for missing glyphs, RTL text appearing backwards, PDF/A validation failures, oversized PDFs, parser errors.
- Accessibility → Tagged PDF, structure tree, /ActualText, PDF/UA, PDF/A — building accessible PDFs that screen readers and archive validators accept.
- PDF/A conformance → PDF/A-1b, 2b, 2u, 3b — full veraPDF conformance with the v1.1.0 Latin font embedding and XMP parity fixes.
- MCP Integration → Use pdfnative from Claude Desktop, Cursor, Continue, and Zed via pdfnative-mcp — 8 tools, per-client configuration, security model, and a signed-document workflow.
- CLI → pdfnative-cli — render JSON to PDF, sign, and inspect from the terminal. Stdin/stdout pipelines, streaming, PDF/A conformance, secret-safe signing.
Looking for samples?
The repository ships with 23 generator categories producing ~140 sample PDFs covering every feature: financial statements, multi-language documents, barcodes, SVG, watermarks, forms, encryption, signatures, streaming, parser, and stress tests.
Interactive playgrounds
- MCP tool explorer → Browse the eight pdfnative-mcp tools, copy a ready-to-paste config snippet for Claude / Cursor / Continue / Zed, and generate the same PDFs an AI assistant would receive — all in your browser.
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CLI command builder →
Compose
pdfnative-cliv0.2.0 commands (render / sign / inspect / verify) interactively. Live shell preview, validation, and one-click presets for every common workflow. - Extreme scripts playground → Stress-test BiDi (Arabic + Hebrew + Thai), Tamil deep conjuncts, Bengali & Devanagari reph + ligature chains, and isolated Arabic harakat directly in the browser.
- Medical 800-page Web Worker playground → Generate a synthetic 800-page clinical report off the main thread using a Web Worker. Live progress, streaming output, optional Tagged PDF.
Contributing
Found a typo, an unclear paragraph, or a missing topic? Edit the underlying .md file directly on GitHub and open a pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for branch naming conventions (docs/*).