The interesting part for me was the architecture: a single pure function buildPaper(config) emits geometric primitives (lines / circles / text), and everything is derived from it - the on-screen SVG preview, the in-browser PDF, and the build-time PDF and OG-image generation. No drawing logic is duplicated across output formats, so adding a new paper style is one renderer function plus about five one-line registrations, and it automatically gets a live preview, a downloadable PDF, an OG image, and SEO pages across every paper size.

Everything is true-to-scale: the SVG viewBox and the PDF are both in millimetres, so a 5 mm grid measures exactly 5 mm on paper when you print at 100%.

It's fully static - no backend, no database, no runtime. About 1,900 pages are prerendered to HTML, ~1,700 PDFs are pre-generated at build time (reusing the exact same draw logic as the browser), and it all deploys to a CDN as plain files.

Tech stack:

- Nuxt 4 / Vue 3 (script setup, TypeScript), Nitro static generation (nuxt generate) - Tailwind CSS v4 plus scoped CSS with a small design-token system - Paper engine: one pure buildPaper() -> primitives; one renderer per style. Single source of truth for preview + PDF + images - Preview: pure renderPaperSvg() -> inline SVG baked into the prerendered HTML, so previews render with zero client JS - PDF: jsPDF (dynamic import) for arbitrary custom configs in the browser; a Bun script reuses the same primitives to pre-build the static PDFs - Social images: SVG -> PNG at build time with @resvg/resvg-js (1200x630 OG per style + full A4 sheets) - Data-driven pSEO: ~40 styles across the full ISO A/B/C and US/Imperial sizes -> ~1,900 pages generated from one data table; JSON-LD (WebSite/HowTo/FAQ/Breadcrumb); selective noindex on low-demand size combos so thin pages don't dilute the site - Tooling: Bun (package manager + native-TS runner for all the generators) - Hosting: Cloudflare Pages, pure static (no worker)

There's also a custom editor (tweak spacing, color and margins, then export) and a virtual graph-paper canvas you can draw on, where the logical drawing space is decoupled from the pixel buffer so it stays crisp on any DPR.

One war story: because Cloudflare Pages serves pages at trailing-slash URLs, the client router saw /foo/ while my lookup table keyed on /foo - so pages rendered correctly server-side, then hydrated straight into a 404. Classic "works with JS off, breaks with JS on."

Happy to answer anything about the rendering pipeline or the static-generation setup.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48761294

Points: 77

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411173

Points: 1

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