boxpdf · flow PDF layout for JS runtimes
Flexbox-style PDF layout for Workers, Node, Deno, browsers
boxpdf · flow PDF layout for JS runtimes launched on May 19, 2026 with 4 votes, #2,419 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
boxpdf is a tiny PDF layout engine for Node, Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Supabase Edge, and browsers. boxpdf: a flexbox-style layout DSL on top of pdf-lib for structured programmatic PDF generation. boxpdf-html: pixel-perfect HTML/CSS renderer designed for environments where Chromium or dynamic WASM are impractical. Supports pagination, wrapping, spacing, headers/footers, images, links, tables, reusable templates, and edge-native deployment without headless Chrome.
Open-source, bounded-memory HTML-to-PDF and declarative PDF layout for JavaScript runtimes, with interactive AcroForms, streaming output, and PDF 2.0 AES-256 encryption.
boxpdf is a tiny OSS toolkit for server-side PDF generation: render document-style HTML + Tailwind CSS with boxpdf-html , or build layouts directly with a flexbox-lite DSL over pdf-lib . Runs in Node , Cloudflare Workers , Deno , and the browser . No WASM. No headless browser. No React. import { cleanTheme, hline, hstack, renderFlow, text, vstack } from "@boxpdf/writer"; import { PDFDocument, StandardFonts } from "pdf-lib"; const pdf = await PDFDocument.create(); const font = await pdf.embedFont(StandardFonts.Helvetica); const bold = await pdf.embedFont(StandardFonts.HelveticaBold); const theme = cleanTheme(font, bold); await renderFlow(pdf, [ vstack({ gap: 8…from boxpdf.dev
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>2024 · github.com · ▲404For the last 5 years I've been working on a layout engine that targets CSS2 and some more modern properties. Live demo: https://chearon.github.io/dropflow/ It matches browsers in all cases I can find where they agree, and it's fast. It supports `position`, `inline-block`, `z-index`, and complex properties like `float` and `vertical-align`. It doesn't support high-level layout like flexbox or grid yet, but you can get intrinsics to easily divide space yourself and paint multiple layout trees. It has a great text layout implementation, and supporting non-Latin scripts is a…
- PJPdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling2020 · ▲334
Hi HN, Nick here. We're super excited to officially launch PDF.js Express [1]. PDF.js Express wraps a modern React UI around the PDF.js rendering engine to enable PDF annotation, form filling, and signing inside your web app. We've also made some improvements to PDF.js text search, and taken a different approach to how the viewer uses the PDF.js rendering API, resulting in sharp graphics at any zoom magnification [2]. Based on our research, more than 70% of those who try to implement these features on top of PDF.js find it too difficult or time-intensive [3]. For those who are successful,…
TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)Dec 2025 · github.com · ▲253I needed to generate invoices in a Node.js app. jsPDF is 229KB. I only needed text, rectangles, lines, and JPEG images. So I wrote tinypdf: <400 lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 3.3KB minified+gzipped. What it does: - Text (Helvetica, colors, alignment) - Rectangles and lines - JPEG images - Multiple pages, custom sizes What it doesn't do: - Custom fonts, PNG/SVG, forms, encryption, HTML-to-PDF That's it. The 95% use case for invoices, receipts, reports, tickets, and labels. GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf npm: npm install tinypdf
More dev tools this month
the category →
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 28d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 26d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 24d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲346Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 21d ago · talanoa.email
CoreSpeed▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
Dev tools · 29d ago · corespeed.io
Source: Product Hunt launch ↗
Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →
Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
🌱 Private, quiet space for thinking. Simple app for .md files. - zakirullin/files.md
Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com