Brussels / 31 January & 1 February 2026

schedule

Why our HTML Docs don't just `Print` and what to do about it


You've perfected your Docs-as-Code pipeline. Your HTML documentation is beautiful, version-controlled, and deploys instantly. Then someone asks for a printing version. Printing? What is it? Ah, a primitive pre-HTML way of publishing, no problem... until you try it.

This talk addresses the fundamental mismatch between the web's fluid layout and the paged, fixed-layout world of print. After creating Asciidoctor to Open Document converter (https://github.com/CourseOrchestra/asciidoctor-open-document) I was so stuck in this mismatch that I nearly concluded print output from simple markup was just a toy, and that achieving quality was impossible.

Luckily, I found inspiration in Pandoc's architecture, which acts as a "metaconverter" -- a factory for building converters. Based on its ideas I completely rewritten Asciidoctor to Open Document converter into Unidoc Publisher (https://github.com/fiddlededee/unidoc-publisher). This worked excellently and now I can share my experience in this field.

I will then map the landscape of rendering solutions. We will compare the core options, which are limited to:

  • native convertors relying on PDF libraries,
  • Paged Media CSS,
  • TeX (and all around),
  • Text Processors Formats (OpenXML in MS Office, Open Document in LibreOffice).

There's no silver bullet, there is just a sensible path. Hope this talk will help to choose the right solution for your needs.

Speakers

Photo of Nikolaj Potashnikov Nikolaj Potashnikov

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