PDF Export

The problem

You need a .it document as a PDF — for email, print, archive, or legal filing.

The solution

dotit document.it --pdf --theme corporate

This renders the document to PDF using the print renderer with full layout support: page size, fonts, headers, footers, watermarks, and signature lines.

Basic export

# Default theme
dotit document.it --pdf

# With a specific theme
dotit document.it --pdf --theme legal

# Template merge to PDF
dotit template.it --data data.json --pdf --theme corporate

Theme selection

Choose a theme that matches the document type:

Theme	Best for
corporate	Business documents, reports, proposals
legal	Contracts, agreements, compliance docs
minimal	Clean, simple documents
print	Maximum readability on paper
editorial	Newsletters, articles
warm	Friendly communications, HR docs
technical	Specs, runbooks, architecture docs
dark	Screen reading (not great for print)

dotit report.it --pdf --theme corporate
dotit contract.it --pdf --theme legal
dotit newsletter.it --pdf --theme editorial

PDF metadata

The PDF inherits metadata from the .it file:

.it block	PDF metadata
title:	PDF Title
summary:	PDF Subject
meta: | author: name	PDF Author
meta: | domain: category	PDF Keywords

Print layout in the source

Control the PDF layout from inside the .it file:

page: | size: A4 | margins: 2.54cm
font: | body: Inter | heading: Inter | size: 11pt
header: Company Name
footer: Page {{page}} of {{pages}}
watermark: CONFIDENTIAL | color: rgba(0,0,0,0.05)

These keywords only affect print/PDF output. They're ignored in standard HTML rendering.

Prerequisites

PDF generation requires Puppeteer:

npm install puppeteer

Puppeteer uses a headless Chromium instance to convert the print HTML to PDF. It's an optional dependency — not needed for parsing, rendering to HTML, or any other operation.

Server-side PDFs: @dotit/pdf

For programmatic PDF generation (emailing invoices, compliance archiving, batch runs), use the dedicated package — core stays zero-dependency:

npm install @dotit/pdf

import { issuePDF } from "@dotit/pdf";

// merge → seal (tamper-evident SHA-256) → real PDF bytes, in one call
const { source, hash, at, pdf } = await issuePDF(templateSource, data, {
  signer: "Billing System",
  role: "Issuer",
  theme: "corporate",
});
// store the sealed .it `source` on the record; email/archive the `pdf` bytes

issueDocument() does the same flow minus Chrome (returns print-ready HTML), and renderPDF() / createPdfRenderer() are the lower-level primitives (the latter reuses one Chrome instance for batch runs).

Batch export

Export multiple documents:

# Export all contracts
for f in contracts/*.it; do
  intenttext "$f" --pdf --theme legal
done

# Export all with a template
for f in invoices/*.it; do
  intenttext "$f" --data clients.json --pdf --theme corporate
done

Next steps

• Print-Ready Documents — full print layout configuration
• Watermark reference — marking drafts and confidential documents
• Contract — complete contract with PDF-ready layout