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Vivliostyle

Open-source CSS typesetting project that turns HTML into print-quality PDF, in a browser or a CLI.

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Where your files are processed

No server involved

The viewer runs in the browser and the CLI and core engine run on your own machine or inside your own application. No Vivliostyle service is in the path for either, though the alpha hosted editor is a separate product. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.

Both the viewer and the command-line tool run where you put them: the viewer in the browser, the CLI on your own machine, and the core engine inside whatever application embeds it. No Vivliostyle service is in the path for either, though the alpha hosted editor is a service and is a separate product.

What it does

Vivliostyle is an open-source typesetting system built on web standards: you write HTML and CSS, and it lays the result out as paginated pages and exports PDF. It comes as a viewer that runs in the browser, a command-line tool for building documents, and a core engine that other software can embed, plus a browser-based editing service that is still in alpha.

It treats CSS Paged Media as the way to make books rather than as a way to print a web page.

Best for

Publishers, documentation teams and individuals who want to produce books and long documents from HTML and CSS with an open-source tool, and JavaScript projects that want a typesetting engine they can embed rather than a command to shell out to. It is the open-source counterpart to the commercial typesetting engines in this index.

Worth knowing

These are separate components with separate statuses rather than one product. The CLI builds PDF, EPUB and other publication outputs and is the part most people install; the core engine is embeddable by other software; and the browser-based editing service is still labelled alpha, which says nothing about the others either way.

The licence is AGPL-3.0, which carries a network clause: if you run a modified version as a service people interact with, you have to offer them the source. That matters most for the viewer, which is designed to be embedded in websites.

Attribution terms should be read per component and per version rather than once for the family.

Details, and where each comes from

Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.

Versions covered
Web · Self-hosted
Website
vivliostyle.org
Requires an account
Not applicable
Watermark on the free tier
Not verified
Maximum file size
Not verified
Batch processing
Yes
Data residency
Self-hosted
Open source
Yes
Self-hostable
Yes
Licence
AGPL-3.0
Redaction
No redaction feature
Programmatic access
Command line · Embeddable library
Last availability check
Responded in 337 ms 21 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.

What the redaction verdict rests on

From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.

What that does not establish

Recorded as `none` on absence and structurally: Vivliostyle typesets HTML into PDF and does not open an existing PDF, so there is no document to redact. What it does not establish: that the output is safe.

The generator caveat applies as it does to every formatter here - and there is one further nuance worth naming, because this is a viewer as well as a generator: the viewer renders HTML a user supplies, so what it displays is whatever the page contains.

https://vivliostyle.org/

What the vendor says

Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.

  • “An open source project for a new typesetting system fitting for digital and web publishing based on the latest web standard technology”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 1 October 2026

    Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01.

    This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.

    Standing: Not re-read against the live source

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://vivliostyle.org/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    78b39c9f95bb37f12f3db7dd5424e041bb375bf0724985d6f23730ef2d9ec52c

    How we checked

    Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “The Vivliostyle project discusses development matters on Slack.”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 1 October 2026

    Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01.

    This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.

    Standing: Not re-read against the live source

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://vivliostyle.org/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    78b39c9f95bb37f12f3db7dd5424e041bb375bf0724985d6f23730ef2d9ec52c

    How we checked

    Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.

Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.

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Related reading

How this record was put together

Editorial review.
No editor has signed this record off. That is not the same as nothing having been checked, and the lines below say what has.
Source reading.
2 claims taken from the vendor's own pages, read between 1 October 2026 and 1 October 2026.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 21 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We ran this ourselves. The file handling was watched directly.

Sources: vivliostyle.org, read 2026-09-22 with headless Chrome, including the product list, the news items and the sponsors section; the licence from the project's LICENSE file in the vivliostyle.js repository. Project documentation, not independently tested; nothing was installed and no document was typeset.