Roses are red
Violets are blue
I create my PDF
With boxes and glue

Welcome to Boxes and Glue

boxes and glue is a software library to create PDF documents and is written in Go. It is

• Super fast. A document can be created within 10 milliseconds on a modern computer.
• Based on algorithms found in TeX. The well known optimum fit line breaking algorithm is used to break paragraphs into lines.
• Capable of multi language texts. Hyphenation patterns and the harfbuzz text shaping library are included to generate PDFs for many languages around the world.
• Many PDF standards are supported. For example it is possible to create accessible PDF (PDF/UA).

boxes and glue is also available as a command line tool called glu. It uses Lua as scripting language and provides a similar API to the Go library. The command line tool is useful for quick and simple PDF generation tasks, or to create PDFs from templates.

Command line tool

The command line tool is called glu and is documented in the command line tool documentation.

Hobby – SVG vector graphics

Hobby is a Lua scripting tool for creating SVG vector graphics. It implements the Hobby-Knuth smooth curve algorithm from MetaPost, allowing you to create beautiful curves that pass through specified points. Hobby is useful for generating diagrams, illustrations, and other vector graphics.

PDF backend library

boxes and glue is based on a low level PDF backend library (baseline-pdf) which is written in Go. It is a pure Go implementation and has only very few dependencies.

Go API Documentation

See getting started section in the documentation.