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; typography and PDF/X-4 flags, your own fonts and byte-reproducible builds since v1.5.0.
• 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; typography, CMYK, PDF/X-4 and reproducible output since v1.7.0.
• pdfnative-react — the same engine driven by JSX components, if your app is already React; typography, PDF/X-4 and a 37-rule linter since v1.3.0.

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 — five production architectures assembled from these parts, four with diagrams, plus per-surface cases for the CLI, the MCP server and the React renderer.

Try things without installing anything

Fifteen playgrounds run in your browser: 32 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, a DocSpec linter, two identical SHA-256 digests from a pinned creation date, PNG, JPEG and JPEG 2000 images with watermarks, and 100,000 pages.

All 38 reference guides are one click away — the three newest cover right-to-left documents, images and the native family (pdfnative with zipnative and pkinative). If something in them does not hold up, say so — a claim we cannot defend is a bug.

Tip: Alt + ← / → moves between steps.