typepress 0.4.0

Pure Rust HTML/CSS → PDF engine — wkhtmltopdf replacement

TypePress

Pure Rust HTML/CSS → PDF engine. No browser required.

TypePress renders HTML and Markdown to PDF using fulgur (Blitz → Taffy → Krilla) — zero external dependencies, no Chromium, no Node.js.

Features

• HTML/CSS → PDF — Full HTML rendering with CSS styling
• Markdown → PDF — GFM extensions, code highlighting via syntect
• LaTeX Math — $...$ and $$...$$ rendered via katex-rs
• Mermaid Diagrams — Flowchart, sequence, class, state, ER diagrams
• CJK Support — Chinese/Japanese/Korean with automatic font subsetting
• Single Binary — ~15MB, zero dependencies, no Chromium/Node.js
• CSS Grid/Flexbox → Table — Automatic layout degradation for taffy compatibility
• Header/Footer — CSS GCPM running elements
• @font-face — Web font loading and embedding
• Small Output — 93KB PDF vs browser screenshots (MB scale)

Quick Start

Install

# Rust / Cargo
cargo install typepress

# npm (Node.js)
npm install typepress-pdf

# pip (Python)
pip install typepress

Basic Usage

# Markdown → PDF
typepress doc.md -o out.pdf

# HTML → PDF with CJK font
typepress page.html -o out.pdf -f /usr/share/fonts/opentype/noto/NotoSansCJK-Regular.ttc

# With math support
typepress doc.md -o out.pdf --math

# YAML-driven workflow
typepress render  # auto-detects typepress.yaml

Configuration

Create typepress.yaml in your project root:

input: doc.md
from: md
output:
  pdf: out.pdf
page:
  size: A4
math: true

Comparison

	TypePress	wkhtmltopdf	Puppeteer	Paper Muncher
No browser	✅	✅	❌	❌
Binary size	~15MB	~40MB	~300MB	~200MB
CSS Grid	🟡 table fallback	✅	✅	✅
Math (KaTeX)	✅	❌	❌	❌
Mermaid	✅	❌	❌	❌
Markdown input	✅	❌	❌	❌
Output size	93KB	200KB	2MB	varies

Architecture

Markdown/HTML → CSS Layout Preprocess → Header/Footer → Math → Mermaid → Code Highlight → fulgur → PDF
                                                                               ↑
                                                                    Blitz → Taffy → Krilla

• Blitz — HTML/CSS parsing
• Taffy — CSS box layout engine
• Krilla — PDF generation
• TypePress — Preprocessing pipeline + CLI

Known Limitations

Taffy (layout engine) does not yet support:

• CSS Grid (display: grid) — automatically converted to <table>
• CSS Flexbox (display: flex) — automatically converted to <table>
• CSS gradients — degraded to solid colors

These are transparent preprocess steps; your HTML renders correctly, just with simplified layout.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and workflow.

TypePress follows OpenSpec spec-driven development. Changes are planned in proposal.md → design.md → specs/ → tasks.md before implementation.

License

Licensed under either of MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.

Based on fulgur (MIT/Apache-2.0).