Design tradeoffs¶

Why choose this dependency shape for the first version?

The project deliberately avoids a pure Rust PDF renderer for the first version.

Rust-native PDF crates are useful for constructing PDFs, but they do not provide modern browser layout or Mermaid rendering. wkhtmltopdf has weaker modern JavaScript support. Pandoc is powerful, but it adds a large external dependency and still needs Mermaid integration.

The current design keeps the Rust part small and testable while delegating JavaScript, CSS, SVG, and PDF layout to a Chromium-family browser.

The main cost is the browser dependency. Users need Chrome, Chromium, or Edge installed, and CI jobs need to make that dependency explicit.