PDF generation without vendor lock-in

Most document platforms store your templates in a format only they can read. That is not an accident — it is the part of the product that makes leaving expensive.

What a proprietary format costs you

If a tool keeps your templates as its own JSON document model, then your templates are not really yours. You cannot diff them, review them in a pull request, or take them anywhere. The export button, if it exists, produces something no other renderer understands. The switching cost is the lock-in, and it grows with every template you add.

The file is the template

A Paperomat template is a Liquid file with HTML in it. That is the whole storage format. What you see in the editor is byte-for-byte what runs, so it diffs cleanly, reviews normally, and belongs to you in the ordinary sense of the word.

<h1>Invoice {{ invoice.number }}</h1>

{% for line in invoice.lines %}
  <tr><td>{{ line.description }}</td></tr>
{% endfor %}

{% include 'footer' %}

Liquid is not ours

Liquid is an open template language with independent implementations in Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Go and .NET. We did not invent it and we do not control it. A template written here renders under any of them, which means the exit is not a promise we make — it is a property of the format.

Import is the same argument, reversed

Because there is no proprietary format to convert into, bringing templates in is mostly mechanical. Upload a folder as a zip — a partials/ directory identifies shared snippets, filenames become their ids, and the includes you already wrote keep working. Existing HTML is already a valid template, because Liquid passes markup it does not recognise straight through.