Bindery is no longer in development. You may be interested in similar open-source projects like paged.js or weasyprint, or commercial offerings like PrinceXML. Also, keep an eye on CSS Paged Media’s browser compatibility.

Approach

Bindery was intended for anyone new to web design. The documentation doesn’t assume you know javascript, and you don’t need a module bundler or build step to get started. If you need help, or something seems unclear in the documentation, feel free to open an issue on Github or ask @bindery_js on twitter.

Bindery relies on your browser’s PDF generation. If you want to adjust a PDF setting, your browser must support it— different browsers and platforms may have different options.

Bindery is open source—report bugs, make suggestions, or lend a hand on Github.

History

Bindery.js 1.0 was developed in Spring 2014 for for/with/in, a publication from participants in the graphic design course HTML Output at RISD. Fellow course members Catherine Leigh Schmidt and Lukas WinklerPrins produced a Jekyll theme called Baby Bindery for the Design Office based on this initial version.

Bindery.js 2.0 has been developed since February 2017 by Evan Brooks. It has been rewritten from scratch to be smaller, faster, more flexible, and more robust. With thanks to John Caserta and Teddy Bradford for contributions and feedback.

Web browsers may eventually support some of Bindery’s features natively— see CSS Paged Media Level 3 and CSS Generated Content. Note that CSS drafts and standards aren’t guaranteed to be adopted. The initial version of Bindery was based on the CSS Regions draft, which was criticized and later abandoned by Chrome. Cross-element layout in Bindery is currently handled by regionize.js.

Colophon

Text is set in Tiempos Headline by Klim Type, and code samples are set in Input Mono by David Jonathan Ross.

This page was rendered at [Time and Date] with [Browser].

This site was last updated at 2:49 AM on Tuesday, April 04, 2023. It is built with Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages. Its source code is available here.