Introduction
What is AstraDoc?
Section titled “What is AstraDoc?”With AstraDoc, designing and generating dynamic, data driven PDF documents for your apps becomes simpler, faster and cheaper. AstraDoc’s visual designer, combined with its styles, components and assets systems, allows you to build dynamic PDFs much faster than traditional methods such as HTML to PDF conversion or direct PostScript rendering.
Some of AstraDoc’s primary features include:
The Visual Designer
Section titled “The Visual Designer”The key aspect that accelerates PDF design in AstraDoc is its drag and drop, WYSIWYG visual designer:
The visual designer allows you to build dynamic PDF documents without requiring knowledge of HTML, CSS, PostScript or any software development package able to generate PDFs. This low barrier to entry enables the democratization of PDF template development and, paired with the ability to view real time previews of the final PDF, greatly accelerates your business’ ability to release PDF generation functionality for your applications.
Templating
Section titled “Templating”Templating provides the functionality to bring dynamic data to your PDF files. Templating will combine documents you’ve designed with JSON payloads provided by you (for previewing) or by your application (through the API). This combination allows for functionality such as simple property substitution and replacement, generation of lists and tables through array bound elements, or, the toggling of element rendering based on conditions within the payload. AstraDoc allows for templating through Handlebars.js, a well known templating library used for web applications.
Styles & Components
Section titled “Styles & Components”As with all software development endeavors, standardization and reusability are critical tools for reducing the overall time and cost associated with initial feature development and long term project maintenance. AstraDoc supports standardization and reusability through Styles and Components.
Styles
Section titled “Styles”Styles provide the ability for you to apply consistent themes and branding across multiple documents. The appropriate use of styles will ensure documents for a particular customer maintain the same styling aspects such as fonts, colors and spacing. Changes to style properties will also automatically apply to all documents associated with the style, reducing the time to undertake project wide styling adjustments.
Components
Section titled “Components”Components enable the re-use of content elements across your documents. In cases where the same set of identical elements are repeatedly re-used (e.g. headers, footers, billing details, customer addresses etc.), components can be built and used instead. This ensures that effort is not duplicated and maintenance of these elements is undertaken in a single place, instead of across many documents. Components are also able to receive data, allowing them to be dynamic.
The API
Section titled “The API”AstraDoc’s API is how your application interfaces with the AstraDoc system to turn your documents into actual PDF Files (AstraDoc returns rendered PDF files as base 64 strings). Our RESTful API uses simple key based authentication and JSON data over a secure SSL connection.