CraftMyPDF

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Build the document generation I actually need instead of CraftMyPDF.

Be clear on the trade: **you are giving up the visual editor.** A developer will write each template. If the person designing documents does not write HTML, that constraint is the product and keeping it may be right.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- A template language — Handlebars or Eta — over HTML and print CSS
- Playwright with headless Chromium for rendering
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- templates: id, name, source, version, sample_payload_json, updated_at
- documents: id, template_id, template_version, payload_json, path, sha256, status, at
- **The sample payload stored with the template** is what makes a preview possible and what documents the expected shape better than any comment

THE TEMPLATE, DESIGNED FOR THE COMMON DOCUMENT
- Almost every generated document is one of four things: an invoice, a report, a certificate, or a letter. All four are a header, a repeating table, totals, and a footer
- Repeating blocks with an index, so alternating row styles work
- **Totals computed on the server and passed in, never computed in the template.** A template doing arithmetic is a template producing invoices whose numbers nobody can verify
- Money formatted with an explicit locale and currency, from integer minor units

THE PREVIEW, WHICH REPLACES THE VISUAL EDITOR
- A preview endpoint rendering the template against the sample payload and returning a PDF immediately
- **Watch the file and re-render on save.** That loop — edit, save, see the document — is most of what the drag-and-drop editor is providing, and it takes an hour to build
- A preview against three payloads: a one-line invoice, a fifty-line one, and one with the longest plausible values. **The fifty-line case is where every template breaks**

PRINT CSS
- `@page` size and margins, `page-break-inside: avoid` on rows, repeating table headers on every page using `thead`
- Running headers and footers with page numbers from print counters
- Millimetres for anything physical, self-hosted fonts, and an explicit wait for fonts before printing

RENDERING SAFELY
- A recycled browser pool sized by memory, a per-job timeout that kills the page, and everything queued
- Escape every value from the payload. Block internal network addresses from the rendering context. **A template rendering untrusted data in a browser on your server is a real attack surface**

STORAGE
- Store the payload, the template version and the output hash, so any document is reproducible exactly as it was issued. For invoices this is not a nicety — it is a legal requirement in most places

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The fifty-line preview and server-side totals. One catches every layout failure before a customer does; the other keeps the numbers defensible.