Again many updates from boxes and glue. glu is now at version 0.0.20 (I know that does't look good, but it has more features than other 2.x software) including

* Color and SVG fonts
* right to left and mixed typesetting
* PDF/UA-2 (tagged PDF 2.0)
* inline images (width depending on outer constraints)
* CMYK CSS support
* repeating table foot
* CSS attr() function
* and lots of bug fixes of course

Enhanced the examples at https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples

Homepage: https://boxesandglue.dev

#boxesandglue #pdf #accessibility #printcss

Busy (long) weekend: written a post on GitHub actions and glu: https://boxesandglue.dev/news/2026-05-glu-github-action/

Also updated glu to v0.0.19 and added some more examples at

https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/glu including some print CSS showcases.

#printcss #boxesandglue #glu #pdf #githubactions

glu is getting mature. This is an example of a markdown file processed with glu (results in a PDF) and checked for accessibility by PAC. All green!

You get a perfectly tagged document from a markdown source with no additional work.

OpenSource, MIT license.
#accessibility #PDFUA #glu #boxesandglue #markdown

Fixed two long standing bugs in the line breaking algorithm in boxes and glue. I had to re-read the Knuth paper about optimum fit line breaking... Both fixes are in v0.2.18

#boxesandglue #knuth #digitaltypography

There are some #xslfo examples in the glu examples section. This is mainly a proof of concept that you can implement your own typesetting system in glu (using Lua).

I am not sure if I create more examples, since XSLFO seems to be a somewhat dead technology. This was mainly done for demonstration purposes.

https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/glu/xslfo

#boxesandglue

Another big step forward for boxes and glue / the Go API: bagme (boxes and glue made easy) is updated with new examples. The interface is so simple: just print some HTML code to the PDF, optionally styled with CSS. Thats it.

https://boxesandglue.dev/bagme/

#boxesandglue #golang #pdf #api

Next big step for boxes and glue. There is a new example in https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/glu/markdown/slides for the command line interface which creates a fully accessible PDF from markdown source without any further settings!

Some specialities: Lua processing, CSS formatting, MetaPost decoration.

#accessibility #boxesandglue

This was an excellent week for boxes and glue.

* the textshape Text shaper is now usable and passes almost all harfbuzz tests (still working on the last ones)
* mpgo - a Go MetaPost code is now pretty much feature complete (an bug free, of course)
* hobby, a Lua frontend for mpgo works fine
* glu, a boxes and glue Lua frontend is getting more and more functionality
* boxes and glue can now render SVGs in PDF and is font aware. it uses the textshape engine to render fonts in SVG.
* Merged some pull requests for textshape and boxesandglue.

https://boxesandglue.dev

#boxesandglue #PDF #SVG #MetaPost

A small follow-up from last post on high speed PDF generation with boxes and glue at

https://news.speedata.de/2025/05/27/highspeedpdfgeneration/

#boxesandglue #highspeedpublishing

Finally created a first real world example for the boxes and glue command line interface at https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/commandline/zugferdinvoice

Creating 1,000 EN 16931 compliant invoices in 14 seconds on an 2021 m1 MacBook Pro is not bad...

#boxesandglue #highspeedpublishing #zugferd