README
¶
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
Directories
¶
| Path | Synopsis |
|---|---|
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internal
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errkind
Package errkind defines sentinel errors for the glu CLI so that errors raised deep in the pipeline can be classified by main() and mapped to distinct process exit codes.
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Package errkind defines sentinel errors for the glu CLI so that errors raised deep in the pipeline can be classified by main() and mapped to distinct process exit codes. |
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lua
|
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backend
Package backend provides Lua bindings for the boxes and glue backend.
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Package backend provides Lua bindings for the boxes and glue backend. |
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cxpath
Package cxpath provides Lua bindings for XPath XML querying using cxpath.
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Package cxpath provides Lua bindings for XPath XML querying using cxpath. |
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htmlbag
Package htmlbag exposes a thin Lua bridge that lets a Lua script hand an HTML payload directly to glu's HTML rendering pipeline, skipping the disk roundtrip of writing the HTML to a file just so `glu file.html` can read it back.
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Package htmlbag exposes a thin Lua bridge that lets a Lua script hand an HTML payload directly to glu's HTML rendering pipeline, skipping the disk roundtrip of writing the HTML to a file just so `glu file.html` can read it back. |
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textshape
Package textshape provides Lua bindings for the textshape ot package, exposing low-level text shaping (HarfBuzz-port) to Lua scripts.
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Package textshape provides Lua bindings for the textshape ot package, exposing low-level text shaping (HarfBuzz-port) to Lua scripts. |
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