pdfcraft/assets/demo

PdfCraft showcase PDF

showcase.html is the source of a 13-page, US Letter test document for viewing and rendering. The PDF is built on your machine and is not committed:

cargo xtask demo-pdf            # writes dist/demo/pdfcraft-showcase.pdf
cargo xtask demo-pdf --chrome /path/to/chrome --out /tmp/showcase.pdf

You need Google Chrome, Chromium or Edge. The tool looks for it in the usual install locations and on PATH, or uses --chrome or the PDFCRAFT_CHROME environment variable if you set one.

How it is built

1. Raster. The xtask renders a Mandelbrot image (Seahorse Valley) and encodes it as a PNG. It then inlines the PNG into the HTML as a data: URI and points {{ASSETS}} at this repository's assets/ directory (for the Inter and JetBrains Mono fonts).
2. Chrome. Headless Chrome prints the page to PDF with --headless=new --no-pdf-header-footer --generate-pdf-document-outline --print-to-pdf. Skia produces 12 tagged pages with embedded font subsets. Variable system-ui weights come out as Type 3 fonts and emoji as Type 3 bitmap glyphs. The pages also get shadings, blend modes, soft masks, tiling patterns, links, named destinations and bookmarks built from the headings.
3. Post-processing with lopdf (xtask/src/demo_pdf/) adds what a browser cannot emit:

   • Annotations. The HTML contains marker links to https://mark.pdfcraft.invalid/<kind>/<id>. Chrome turns each one into a Link annotation whose /Rect follows the layout. The xtask replaces each marker with a real annotation: Highlight, Underline, StrikeOut, Squiggly, Caret, Text with Popup and a threaded reply and review state, FreeText with /DA and /RC, Line with arrow, Square, Circle, Polygon, PolyLine, Ink, a custom "APPROVED" Stamp and a FileAttachment. Every annotation has its own /AP appearance stream, plus /T, /M, /NM and /Contents.

   • An appended AcroForm page, drawn directly with the standard 14 fonts:

     • text fields, including date and amount fields with AFDate_*/AFNumber_* format actions, and a multiline field
     • checkboxes, a radio group, a combo box and a multi-select list box
     • a push button whose JavaScript action calls app.alert
     • an unsigned signature field

     Every widget has /AP appearance streams, so NeedAppearances is false.

   • Layers. "Draft watermark" (on) puts a diagonal DRAFT on the review page. "Print-only notes" is off on screen and on when printed, with /AS usage events.

   • Page labels. The pages are labelled Cover, i, ii, then 1 to 10.

   • Bookmarks. Chrome's heading outline is kept, with its titles tidied, and an entry is added for the form page.

   • Metadata and attachments. The Info dictionary and an XMP metadata stream carry the same values. /ViewerPreferences /DisplayDocTitle and /PageMode /UseOutlines are set. showcase-data.csv is attached in /EmbeddedFiles and /AF, and review-notes.txt is attached through the file-attachment annotation.

Chrome embeds subsets of macOS system fonts (Hoefler Text, Didot, Avenir Next, Geeza Pro, Kohinoor Devanagari, Hiragino, Apple Color Emoji and others), so the output depends on the host and we must not redistribute it. This is why dist/ is gitignored. On Linux or Windows the CSS falls back to other fonts and the layout will differ. The xtask refuses to continue if Chrome's page count is not 12, because the post-processing uses fixed page indices.

Editing the showcase

• Each <section class="page"> is exactly one Letter page with overflow: hidden. Keep every section's content inside its page.
• The page order is fixed in xtask/src/demo_pdf/postprocess.rs (PAGE_CONTENTS, PAGE_SETTING_TEXT, PAGE_REVIEW).
• Marker links use white-space: nowrap, so each one produces a single rectangle.
• All prose is original. The chart values in showcase-data.csv are illustrative only.

To check the result, look at the output of pdfinfo, pdffonts and qpdf --check, and render the pages with pdftoppm -r 60 -png dist/demo/pdfcraft-showcase.pdf /tmp/showcase.