pdf

Produce a PDF that reads as deliberately designed: a print artifact with a type scale, a baseline grid, generous margins, AA contrast, and page furniture. The division of labor is the point. The LLM writes only the content as Markdown, and scripts/render.sh renders it deterministically through pandoc plus a PDF engine. Styling lives in a CSS file or a pandoc template the script applies, so no reportlab or weasyprint code gets hand-written per run. The design system, the archetypes, the failure modes, and a worked example live in beautiful PDFs; load that reference for the design principles before styling.

Steps

1. Name the document type and its sections. State which archetype the output is (report, proposal, invoice, or one-pager) and list the sections that archetype needs per the reference. The step is done once the archetype and the section list are both written down.

2. Write the body as Markdown. Author the content into a content.md file, applying the archetype layout and the table rules (no border-soup, numerals right-aligned, header row present) from the reference. The step is done once content.md holds the full document content with headings, prose, and tables in place.

3. Choose the styling. Decide between a CSS stylesheet (for a CSS engine such as weasyprint or wkhtmltopdf) and a pandoc template, then snap the page size, the margins (18–25 mm floor), the type scale, the leading, and the color palette to the scales in the design reference. The step is done once every spacing and type value maps to a scale in the reference, with no off-scale value remaining.

4. Render with the script. Run scripts/render.sh content.md out.pdf --engine ENGINE, naming the chosen engine and adding --css FILE for a CSS engine. The step is done once the command prints wrote out.pdf and exits zero.

5. Verify by reopening the output. Read the first four bytes of the rendered file and confirm the document opens at the intended length. The step is done once head -c 4 out.pdf prints %PDF and the page count matches the intended length.

6. Score against the design checklist. Walk the rendered page against the final checklist in the reference: margins, type scale, baseline grid, AA contrast, break discipline, table styling, furniture, and the not-default-print test. The skill is done once each checklist line holds or carries a written, justified exception.

Scripts

• scripts/render.sh: renders Markdown to PDF through pandoc. Usage: render.sh <content.md> <out.pdf> [--engine ENGINE] [--css FILE]. With no --engine, the script auto-detects the first available of weasyprint, wkhtmltopdf, typst, tectonic, xelatex, or pdflatex. The --css flag applies to the CSS engines (weasyprint, wkhtmltopdf). Run render.sh --selftest to self-check the toolchain.