ALATINE
The HTML & CSS publishing engine

Your HTML.
Beautifully published.

From a single invoice to an entire book. Beautifully typeset PDFs and images, rendered locally with the web technologies you already use — straight from the browser, in your desktop or mobile app, or on your servers. Or let our API handle it.

Start publishing Explore the docs
From the browserWebAssembly + nativePDF · SVG · PNG · WebPOffline. On your terms.
book.html + CSS01 / INPUT
<!-- Full manuscript · 106 rendered pages -->
<main class="book">
  <section class="chapter">…</section>
  <!-- All chapters, all paragraphs. -->
</main>

<style>
  p { text-align: justify; hyphens: auto; }
  @page { size: A5; margin: 18mm; }
</style>
Palatine engineWebAssembly · runs locally
COMPLETE
ParseTypesetPaginateExport
783ms106 / 106 pages
02 / PUBLISHEDbook.pdf · 268 KiB
106pages
783 ms.An entire book in under a second

Animated benchmark replay · View measured results
AMD EPYC · 6-core Linux · medians of 3 runs. WASM: warm render, excluding 388 ms initialization. Native: complete CLI process. Source and artwork are illustrative.

More than a conversion

A publishing studio.
Inside your app.

The details that turn a document into something worth reading.

01 / STRUCTURE

Every page has its place.

Page sizes, margins, running headers and page numbers. A coherent publication, from first page to last.

Paged mediaRead article
02 / TYPOGRAPHY

Words, beautifully composed.

Knuth–Plass justification, hyphenation, optical margins, widows and orphans. Book typography from HTML.

Paragraph-wide compositionRead article
03 / CONNECTIONS

Keep the whole story together.

Footnotes, linked notes, cross-references and PDF links. Details readers can follow.

Read article
04 / LAYOUT

Bring your own CSS.

Grid, flexbox, columns, floats, transforms, masks and clipping. Familiar tools for ambitious layouts.

Read article
05 / LANGUAGE

Type beyond the alphabet.

HarfBuzz shaping, bidirectional text, Arabic, CJK and vertical writing.

Read article
06 / OUTPUT

One layout. Four possibilities.

Vector PDF with embedded fonts, scalable SVG, PNG and WebP. Ready to print, display or share.

Read article
Typography

Knuth–Plass line breaking.

Browsers break justified text one line at a time, and it shows: tight lines next to loose ones, rivers of white. Palatine can compose each paragraph as a whole with the Knuth–Plass algorithm, the one behind TeX, choosing all the breaks together so that every line is evenly spaced.

Add hyphenation penalties, bounded word spacing, last-line control and optical margins, and you get pages that look typeset: books, magazines, long reports, anything that is mostly text.

How Knuth–Plass works
THE SPACE BETWEEN THE WORDS
A line at a time.Browser-style line breaking

Typesetting a book is mostly a matter of patience. Every line of a justified paragraph has to be filled to the same measure, and the space between words is the only thing the compositor can stretch. Break the lines one at a time and a long word at the wrong moment leaves a line full of holes.

Watch the paragraph settle.Widest space —×

Same words. Same width. Different line breaks. An illustration of paragraph-wide composition.

Two ways to publish

Your devices. Or our API.

The same publishing engine. Run it locally, from your users’ browsers to your servers — or call our hosted API when you would rather not.

Local engine · entirely yours

Web technologies.
Rendered locally.

Run the WebAssembly build straight from the browser, in a desktop or mobile app, or the native build on your servers. Your documents never leave the device that makes them.

Volume-basedlicense · 1 year of support and updates

Following years −50%

  • From the browser. The HTML and CSS you know, rendered on your users’ devices.
  • Unlimited documents. No per-document fees, no render time limit.
  • Entirely offline. No network calls, with full control over your data.
Contact UsSelf-hosting guide
Hosted API · ready to call

One request.
We handle the rest.

POST your HTML and CSS from the language you already use. Receive a PDF or image ready to save, send or display — faster than DocRaptor, for a fraction of its price.

€5per month

+ €0.005 / document ~20× less than DocRaptor

  • No rendering infrastructure. We handle rendering and hosting.
  • Pay as you go. Only successfully generated documents count.
  • Every page included. A single page or an entire book, up to 5 minutes per render.
API reference
render.ts
const key = process.env.PALATINE_API_KEY;
const url = "https://api.palatine.page/v1/render";
const response = await fetch(url, {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: "Bearer " + key,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    html: "<h1>Hi!</h1>", format: "pdf",
  }),
});
if (!response.ok) throw Error(response.statusText);
const pdf = await response.arrayBuffer();
POST /v1/renderHTML in. Document out.
Comparison

Palatine and PrinceXML

Prince is the reference for printing HTML. We test our paged media against Prince 15.1, page by page; here is where the two differ.

PALATINENative · WASM · APIPrinceXMLNative renderer
Direct hosted APIReady to call · €5 / month + €0.005 / documentThrough DocRaptor, a third party
On-premise pricingOne license per build for your entire company and server fleet, priced by volume$2,660–$3,800 per server
Paged mediaMargin boxes, running elements, footnotes, page floats, cross-referencesSame, with more years of edge cases
Paragraph composerKnuth–Plass, opt-inLine by line
Browsers, edge, serverlessWebAssembly: Node, Bun, browsers, WorkersNative binaries only
OutputsPDF, SVG, PNG, WebPPDF, PNG, JPEG
JavaScript, tagged PDFNot supportedSupported

Read the full comparison

The cost of your next million pages

Find your plan.

One page or a whole book.
Choose your monthly volume and compare a month of rendering.

12,000 documents / year
100,000 documents / month
PALATINE RecommendedAPI

Let us run it.

€10.00/ month

€5 / month + €0.005 / document.
Any page count, up to 5 minutes per render.

Managed rendering, pay as you go
DOCRAPTOR API

Choose a monthly plan.

$75.00/ month

Premium plan
1,250 documents included monthly.

Lowest estimated plan + overage
PALATINE LOCAL

Run it yourself.

Volume-basedlicense

From the browser, a desktop or mobile app, or your servers. No per-document fees, no render time limit.

Contact Us
Support and updates included

At this volume, choose the Palatine API.Your estimated API cost stays within €250 / month.

Choose the API
Articles

From the blog

Performance

Measured rendering time, startup and memory across Node.js, Bun, browsers and WASI runtimes, with a ten-document corpus and downloadable samples.

Read

Palatine vs PrinceXML

Two HTML-to-PDF engines built for paged media. Where they agree on the same documents, where they differ, and which one to pick.

Read

Knuth–Plass: line breaking for books

Why browsers break lines one at a time, why TeX optimizes the whole paragraph, and how Palatine brings that to HTML.

Read

Every page has its place

How to decide on a page size, margins, running headers and page numbers for a printed template, and how to check them with real content.

Read

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