Programming

Building PDF Stamp Placement Without a Framework — Click to Place, Drag to Move

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. Sign & Fill lets users click anywhere on a PDF page to place a stamp or signature image — then drag it…

Why I Wrote a Pixel-by-Pixel Multiply Blend in PHP-GD to Beat Dompdf

A real estate broker came to me with a familiar problem. Every property exposé — the glossy multi-page PDF that goes to potential buyers — was being a…

Repairing a Broken PDF in Rust — Rebuilding the XREF Table From Scratch

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. Some PDFs won't open. Not because the content is gone — because the index that tells readers where to find…

Pixel Diff vs Structural Diff for PDFs — Two Very Different Problems

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. "Compare these two PDFs" sounds like one problem. It's actually two completely different problems dependin…

Implementing Bates Numbering in Rust — Stamping Every Page of a Legal Document

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. Bates numbering is a sequential stamp applied to every page of a legal document — "EXHIBIT-0001", "EXHIBIT…

Generating PDF Invoices with a Single API Call (No Libraries Needed)

Generating PDF Invoices with a Single API Call (No Libraries Needed) If you've ever tried to generate PDF invoices programmatically, you know the pain…

Introducing fulgur: a blazing fast HTML-to-PDF engine in Rust — no browser required

fulgur — (noun, Latin) lightning, flash of lightning. I've been building fulgur , an HTML-to-PDF engine written in Rust. No headless browser, no Chrom…

I Built a Security Scanner That Audits PDFs Before You Send Them. Here's How. [Devlog #10]

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. You're about to email a contract. It looks clean. But it still has your name, your machine's hostname, the…

The Page Order Math Behind Saddle-Stitch Booklets Is Weirder Than You Think. So I Automated It. [Devlog #8]

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. Print pages 1, 2, 3, 4 in order, fold the paper — and the result is wrong. Booklet printing requires a com…

Generating PDFs from JSON Instead of HTML: Why Templates Are a Dead End

The HTML-to-PDF Pipeline Everyone Regrets You need to generate PDFs. Invoices, contracts, reports, certificates — the kind of documents businesses sen…

Как я парсил банковские платёжки всех российских банков на Python: история боли, костылей и XML-матрёшек

Привет, Хабр! (И тебе, случайный бухгалтер, который думает, что «выгрузить из банка» - это нажать одну кнопку. И тебе, 1С-разработчик, который слышит …

Factur-X EN 16931 from scratch: PDF/A-3 + CII XML in Node.js / TypeScript

France's e-invoicing reform kicks in September 1st 2026 . Germany's has been live since 2025. By 2027, every B2B invoice in the EU will be structured.…

High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips

How I Built a Fluent PDF Library and Visual Drag-and-Drop Builder for PHP

After years of struggling with PDF generation in PHP, I finally decided to do something about it. I was tired of losing time manually adjusting coordi…

HTML to PDF API: Convert Web Content to PDF Programmatically with Foxit

Your Puppeteer setup works fine at low volume. You launch a Chrome process, load the page, call page.pdf() , and write the bytes to disk. Then your in…

I Built 10 Free PDF Tools That Run Entirely in Your Browser

No uploads. No signups. No server processing. I built a complete PDF toolkit where everything happens in your browser using pdf-lib . Your files never…

Past, Present, Future: The PHPUnit Story

Live++: A Bag of Tricks

You Don't Need a Free PDF Compressor Website Anymore

There is a specific feeling that comes with uploading a PDF to a free compressor website. You land on a page plastered with ads, you drag your file in…