🚀 Introducing @vmprint/preview: Professional Typesetting + Live Preview in a Single 1.7MB Bundle

[cosmiciron]

🚀 Introducing @vmprint/preview: Professional Typesetting + Live Preview in a Single 1.7MB Bundle

For years, browser-based document generation has been a trade-off. You could generate a PDF (jsPDF, pdfmake), but you couldn't preview it without a massive interpreter like PDF.js. You could "fake" a preview with HTML/CSS, but the final printed result never quite matched.

@vmprint/preview officially ends that trade-off.

It is a "batteries-included," standalone browser controller for the VMPrint engine. It packs a professional, desktop-publishing-grade layout engine, multiple rendering contexts, and a smart font manager into one zero-dependency, minified 1.7MB package.

💎 Why it’s a game-changer:

• Single Layout, Triple Output: Run your layout once and get perfect Canvas preview, high-fidelity PDF export, and portable SVG outlines—all from the same state.
• No PDF.js Required: Unlike other tools, we don't need a 10MB PDF interpreter to show you what your document looks like. Our engine renders directly to the browser's Canvas API with sub-point precision.
• DTP-Grade Engine: Not a simple "flow" renderer. You get multi-column layouts, zone-map exclusions, table flow, widow/orphan control, and custom scripting hooks.
• Smart Font Pipeline: Automatically downloads, subsets, and caches only the glyphs your document actually uses via IndexedDB. No more font-loading headaches.
• Framework Agnostic: Pure vanilla JS/TS. Use it with React, Vue, Svelte, or nothing at all.

📦 Quick Start

npm install @vmprint/preview

import { createVMPrintPreview } from '@vmprint/preview';

// Initialize a session with your document AST
const preview = await createVMPrintPreview(documentInput);

// Render any page to a canvas in milliseconds
await preview.renderPageToCanvas(0, myCanvasElement);

// Export to PDF immediately
const pdfBytes = await preview.exportPdf(); 

🏆 The Numbers

• Total Bundle Size: ~1.76 MB (Minified)
• Dependencies: 0
• Supported Outputs: Canvas, PDF (via PDF-Lite), SVG (Glyph-Path and Selectable Text)

Check out the Live Interactive Demo to see it in action—paste your AST, hit render, and export.

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🏛️ Truly Static — Run from file://

One of the coolest things about this release? The entire example set works immediately from disk.

No Node.js, no Docker, no Vite dev server needed to preview your documents. You can download the static zip, open index.html in your browser, and every VMPrint pipeline—from Markdown transmutation to the final PDF export—just works.

Why it matters:

• Security: No document data ever leaves the local environment.
• Offline Readiness: Build tools that don't need an internet connection to produce professional results.
• Zero-Config Demos: Ship full-feature document interfaces as single folders ready for internal distribution or client review.