8. Where to go from here

Before this: You have worked through the previous seven steps.

You can build, lay out, localise, deliver and scale a document. Everything below is a specialisation of what you already know — the content object never changes shape.

Pick the surface that fits your work

• The library — what you have been using. Full control, any runtime.
• pdfnative-cli — 21 commands for shell scripts, CI and Makefiles. Render, sign with the full PAdES ladder, encrypt, extract text, fill forms, merge and split, compare, all from JSON on stdin.
• pdfnative-mcp — 28 tools that let an AI assistant (Claude, Cursor, Zed, any MCP client) produce, sign and inspect PDFs on your behalf, with no code.
• pdfnative-react — the same engine driven by JSX components, if your app is already React.

Common next requirements

• PDF/A — archival conformance, validated against veraPDF in CI.
• Accessibility — tagged PDF, structure tree, PDF/UA checks.
• Digital signatures — CMS/PKCS#7, RSA and ECDSA.
• Charts — native vector, no rasterisation.
• Typography — widow and orphan rules, justification, hyphenation, kerning and OpenType features, all opt-in.
• Print production — page boxes, printer's marks, CMYK colours and OutputIntents, PDF/X-4 and its validator.
• Form filling and text extraction — working with PDFs you did not create.
• Merge, split and decrypt — restructuring existing documents.
• Ecosystem use cases — four production architectures assembled from these parts, with diagrams.

Try things without installing anything

Twelve playgrounds run in your browser: 27 writing systems in one document, each typographic option against the default, a press-ready PDF/X-4 sheet with its validation report, native charts, the full toolkit, an inspect-and-verify report on any PDF you drop in, a CLI command builder, an MCP tool explorer, the React renderer, and 100,000 pages.

All 32 reference guides are one click away. If something in them does not hold up, say so — a claim we cannot defend is a bug.

Tip: Alt + ← / → moves between steps.