glu

glu

Markdown to PDF. With typographic precision.

glu turns Markdown into beautifully typeset PDFs — with real line breaking, hyphenation, font shaping, and all the things you'd expect from a proper typesetting engine. Under the hood it uses boxes and glue, a Go library that implements TeX's algorithms.

glu document.md        # → document.pdf

What makes glu different?

• Markdown first — Write Markdown, get a PDF with proper typography. No LaTeX, no XML.
• CSS for styling — Page size, fonts, margins, borders, background colors — all via CSS.
• Lua for logic — Embed Lua blocks for computed content, table of contents, dynamic data.
• Callbacks — Hook into page creation for headers, footers, decorative frames, watermarks.
• TeX quality — Knuth-Plass line breaking, optical margin alignment, microtypography.

Quick example

---
title: The Frog King
css: custom.css
---

# Once upon a time

In olden times when wishing still helped one,
there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful.

```{lua}
return string.format("5! = %d", factorial(5))
```

glu story.md    # → story.pdf

More

glu also supports raw HTML mode, low-level Lua scripting for full control, and direct access to the typesetting engine's node lists.

Full documentation: boxesandglue.dev/glu

Installation

rake build      # creates bin/glu

License

MIT