What we are building next: Better PDF Designer and the SDK

Upcoming, not shipped. Everything in this post describes work in progress. The details may change before it ships, and there is no date yet.

Better PDF started with reading, filling and signing. Those are the jobs everyone has. But many people we hear from also have a second job: making the same document again and again with different data. An invoice for each order. A certificate for each attendee. A payslip, a quote, a shipping label, a contract with a new name and date.

Today that means a template service priced per document, a headless browser on a server, or a lot of code. We looked into how people do it and wrote up what goes wrong in Generating PDFs from JSON: why it is still painful in 2026. The short version: tables that break badly across pages, fonts that go missing, form fields that come out blank, output that screen readers cannot follow, and signing that needs another tool.

So we are building two things.

Better PDF Designer

Designer will be a new mode in Better PDF for Mac, for laying out a document once and filling it from data.

• A page you design. Text frames, images, lines, tables, QR codes and barcodes, laid out on a real page with margins and master pages for the header and footer. Page numbers such as “Page 3 of 7” are a variable, not a puzzle.
• Tables that paginate. A table that runs past the end of a page carries on to the next one, repeats its header row and keeps each row together. You do not write page-break rules.
• Data from JSON or CSV. Put {{customer.name}} where the name goes, repeat a row for each item, show a section only when a field is set. Open your data file and step through the records to see each one on the page before you generate anything.
• Warnings before, not after. Designer flags a missing field, text that does not fit its frame, or a character no font in the template can draw, while you are still designing.
• Fonts that come along. Every font is embedded in the PDF, and right-to-left text, Indic scripts and Chinese, Japanese and Korean are set correctly.
• One or a thousand. Generate a single PDF, or one per record with a file name you choose, such as invoice-{{number}}.pdf.
• Signed in the same step. Sign every document you generate with your certificate, smart card or USB token, the same way Better PDF signs today, with a time-stamp if you want one.
• Forms you already have. Open an existing PDF form, match its fields to your data, and fill one copy or a batch. Keep the fields live or flatten them.
• Built for archiving and access. Output can be tagged for screen readers, follow PDF/A for archiving, and carry the source data inside the file as an attachment.

Templates will be saved as a PDF with the template inside. Anyone can open one in any viewer and see a sample, and you can also export it as plain files to keep in version control.

Better PDF SDK

The SDK will be the same engine for developers, for when the documents come from your own app or your own server rather than from a person at a Mac.

• A Swift package for macOS, iOS and iPadOS. Load a template, pass your data, get a PDF.
• A command-line tool, bpdf, for macOS: generate from a template with JSON on standard input, fill a form, sign, and check a template for missing fonts, overflowing text and PDF/A or accessibility problems.
• The same templates. A template made in Designer runs unchanged in the SDK, so the person who designs the document and the developer who wires up the data work on the same file.
• Repeatable output. The same template and data give the same file, so you can test your documents the way you test your code.
• No browser engine. It is native code, with no Chromium to install, update or keep alive.

What stays the same

On the device. Designer and the SDK run on your Mac, iPhone, iPad or your own machine. Your data and documents are never sent to us, because there is no server of ours to send them to.

No price per document. Generating ten documents or ten thousand will cost the same. Our plan is for Designer to be part of Better PDF Pro, the one-time purchase that covers Mac, iPhone and iPad. For the SDK we are working out a developer licence, with a free tier for individuals, open-source projects and small companies. Neither is final, and we will publish prices before anything ships.

No lock-in. Templates are PDFs with the template inside and can be exported as plain files. If you stop using Better PDF, your documents are still PDFs.

What it will not do, at least at first

We would rather say this now than disappoint you later. The first version will not take HTML and CSS as input. It will not run as a hosted API, because we are not building a cloud. It will not run on Windows, and Linux for the command-line tool is on the longer roadmap, not in the first version. It will not draw charts, so you place them as images for now. It will not run email-and-link signing workflows; it signs the documents it makes, with your own certificate.

Tell us what you make

We are designing this around real documents, and yours may be the one that shapes it. If you generate PDFs from data, at work or in an app, write to hello@evenpine.com. It helps to know:

• what the document is, and roughly how many you make,
• where the data comes from (a spreadsheet, a database, an app),
• what goes wrong today, and what you use now,
• whether it needs signing, archiving or accessibility,
• whether you would use Designer on a Mac, the SDK, or both.

We read every email. Meanwhile, Better PDF for Mac reads, fills and signs for free today: download it.

Questions people ask

When will Better PDF Designer be available?

There is no date yet. Designer and the SDK are on our roadmap after the iPhone and iPad app. We would rather show them working than promise a month.

Will Designer cost extra?

Our plan is to make Designer part of Better PDF Pro, the one-time purchase, but pricing is not final. What is decided is that neither Designer nor the SDK will charge per document.

Will the SDK run on Linux or Windows?

The first version is planned for Apple platforms: a Swift package for macOS, iOS and iPadOS, and a command-line tool for macOS. Linux is on the longer roadmap. If you need it, tell us at hello@evenpine.com, because it helps us decide.