PageWright Studio

Version 1.0 · macOS & Windows 11Design Accessible PDF Documents on your Desktop

PageWright™ Studio shows you the finished page — rendered by the same engine that will write the PDF — and lets you edit it directly. Click a block to select it, drag it, resize it by its handles, double-click and type. There is no preview mode, because there is nothing to preview: what the canvas shows is what ships.

Every page is drawn by PageWright, Appligent's document engine, built on the Adobe PDF Library. Declare the standards a document must meet — PDF/UA for accessibility, PDF/A for archiving — and the export writes the structure tree, alternate text and metadata as the document composes, then the app validates the result with veraPDF, built in (veraPDF needs Java 8 or later).

Underneath, a PageWright Studio document is a plain JSON specification. What you design by hand today, a pipeline can regenerate with fresh data tomorrow, in exactly the layout you designed — on your desktop, or unattended on your servers with PageWright.

ScreenshotsA Look Inside PageWright Studio

The PageWright Studio main window with the PageWright brochure open and the title on its cover selected: a palette of block types and an outline of the document on the left, with the title's row highlighted; the cover in the middle, with selection handles around the title; and the inspector on the right, listing the heading's type, font, size, color, spacing and position. — **The page is the interface.** The block palette and the document outline on the left, the page as the engine renders it in the middle, and the inspector on the right — here with the PageWright brochure open and its title selected.

The New Document dialog: a list of templates with Annual Report selected, a list of eight themes, and a preview of the annual report cover. — **File > New > From Template.** Pick what you are making, then the theme that styles it; the preview shows the starter document in that theme.

The inspector's Properties tab for a paragraph, listing Type, Style, Float, Font, Size, Color, Line height, Weight, Alignment, spacing, Keep with next, Text language and Drop cap. — **The inspector.** A form built from the PageWright schema for whatever is selected — here a paragraph: its style, font, size, color, spacing and drop cap.

The Document Standards dialog: PDF/A set to None, PDF/UA set to Automatic, PDF/UA-1 when tagged, Tagged PDF checked, and a note that the file will claim PDF/UA-1. — **Document > Output Standards.** Declare PDF/UA and PDF/A; the dialog says what the file will claim, and Validate Now checks it with veraPDF (needs Java 8 or later).

The Accessible Table dialog for a table of 10 rows and 5 columns, listing each row with the role it will be tagged with, such as column band or body row. — **Block > Accessible Table.** Say which rows are headings and which are totals, so a screen reader can announce them.

The Typography dialog with Hyphenate Latin words, Optical margins, Optimal line breaks (Knuth-Plass) and Kerning checked, the language set to en-US, and a drop cap over 3 lines for the selected block. — **Document > Typography.** Hyphenation, optical margins, optimal line breaks and kerning for the whole document; small caps and drop caps for the selected block.

The Document Data dialog showing an inline JSON record of regions with their names and values, and a field for an external data file. — **Document > Data Sources.** A JSON record whose fields fill {{tokens}} anywhere text appears, or an external data file instead.

SamplesWhat You Can Make

Tables, forms, barcodes, charts, and scripts from Arabic to Japanese: each sample below was laid out by the PageWright engine, the same engine that draws PageWright Studio's canvas and writes its PDFs. They come from the PageWright brochure, which Studio opens and edits like any other document. Click a sample to see it full size.

Tables. Headers that span two levels, rows grouped by site, a bar drawn inside a cell, and column heads turned on their side. A long table repeats its header on every page it crosses.

The top half of a fictional tax form, AP-104 Income and Interest Declaration: boxed fields for names, identification numbers and an address, choices for filing status and digital assets, a table of dependents, numbered lines for income, and fields for occupation and date. — **Insert > Form Field.** Text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and a signature field in a boxed grid, here on a fictional tax form. They are real AcroForm fields that a reader fills in and saves in a PDF viewer, and each is tagged, so the form stays accessible.

Five barcodes — QR Code, Han Xin, Aztec, EAN-13 and PDF417 — above a product label for PageWright set in English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with a QR code and a column of Chinese set vertically. — **Insert > Barcode.** Eight symbologies on the menu and many more by name — here QR Code, Han Xin, Aztec, EAN-13 and PDF417 — drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp at any size. The label below is set in five languages, its Chinese column vertically.

One sentence in sixteen languages — English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean — beside panels showing a Chinese passage set across the page and down it, Hebrew and Arabic running right to left around the Latin words JSON and PDF, and Devanagari letters that fuse. — **Every reader's language.** Arabic and Hebrew run right to left, with the Latin words inside them kept in order; Devanagari letters fuse; Chinese sets across or down the page. **Format > Language** marks the language of the words you select, so a screen reader switches voices as it reads.

Four charts: a combo chart of revenue bars and a margin line on two axes, a doughnut chart of revenue by channel, a stacked area chart of traffic by channel, and a line chart of response time by release, with error bars and a dashed budget line. — **Insert > Chart.** Twenty chart types, drawn as vector art in the document's theme colors and tagged as figures with your alternate text. Double-click a chart to edit its numbers in a grid that redraws as you type.

Nine more charts: a treemap, a Sankey diagram of energy flows, a heatmap, a radar chart, a waterfall chart, a funnel, a box plot, a candlestick chart and a bubble chart. — **…and the rest of the gallery.** Treemap, Sankey, heatmap, radar, waterfall, funnel, box plot, candlestick and bubble: each one is the same Chart block with a different chart type.

A dashboard: six KPI cards — on-time delivery, documents rendered, median render time, support backlog, conformance and storage — each with a large figure, a bar and a badge, above a scorecard with pass and check badges set inside its sentences and four progress bars. — **Cards, grids and gauges.** A Card Grid of KPI tiles that wraps to fit the page and continues onto the next a row at a time, bar gauges that show progress without a chart, and badges that sit inside a sentence.

A flowchart of how PageWright makes a PDF: check the spec, bind the data, measure and count the pages until they settle, draw and tag the structure, add the output intent and fonts, validate with veraPDF, and ship the PDF. — **Diagrams.** Paste a diagram's SVG — rendered from Mermaid, or drawn by any tool — and it is placed as vector art, tagged as a figure with your alternate text.

A page of mathematics set like a textbook: the quadratic formula, the sum of the first n integers, the limit of sin x over x and the Gaussian integral, numbered 1 to 4, among paragraphs of serif text with equations inline. — **Insert > Text > Equation.** Type LaTeX or MathML and the equation is set as vector type, on a line of its own or inline in a sentence, and tagged as a formula with its MathML attached.

Display type: the words Shadow, Lift, Echo, Background, Glow and Neon, each drawn with its effect; the word GRADIENT filled with a blue-to-teal gradient; the words Set along a curve on an arc; and four color emoji. — **Display type.** Shadow, lift, echo, glow, neon and gradient-filled letters, and a headline set along a curve, all still live text that can be selected, searched and read aloud.

The Page Is the Interface

Direct manipulation on the real page — selection handles, a rotation grip, snap-to-grid, and undo behind every move
Type where the text lives: double-click and the paragraph becomes an editor in the exact geometry of the printed line, reflowing as you type
Edit tables in place — insert rows and columns anywhere, tint the header band, set widths in points or fractions; a long table repeats its header on every page
The document is a tree: drag outline rows to reorder or re-parent them, filter by type, and Convert To turns a block into another kind without retyping it
Paste from Word or a web page and it lands as real blocks — headings, lists, tables — ready to restyle, never a picture of text
Draw Bezier curves that reshape by their anchors and handles, and set any paragraph along the curve you drew
Everyday mechanics: undo everywhere, autosave with crash recovery, Find & Replace with hits highlighted on the page, and rulers and guides in inches, centimeters or points

75 Blocks, One Inspector

Text, tables, images, charts, barcodes, form fields, footnotes, cross-references and repeating data blocks — 75 ready-to-place blocks, inserted from the menu or dragged from the tool palette, and one inspector that speaks the engine's vocabulary without its syntax.

Text — paragraph, heading, subheading, bulleted and numbered lists, preformatted text, call-out box, equation, badge, footnote, endnote, running-head marker, cross-reference
Layout — table, container, card, card grid, columns, bar gauge, spacer, rule, page break
Media and shapes — image, SVG image, diagram, emoji; rectangle, ellipse, line, polygon, Bezier curve
Charts — 20 types: bar, line, pie, area, waterfall, funnel, treemap, Sankey, stacked bar, horizontal bar, combo, doughnut, scatter, bubble, radar, polar, candlestick, box plot, heatmap and gauge, drawn as native vector art and tagged
Barcodes — Code 128, QR Code, EAN-13, UPC-A, Code 39, Data Matrix, PDF417, Aztec
Placed PDF — a page of another PDF, or a contact sheet of a whole file
Form fields — text field, checkbox, radio buttons, dropdown, list box, signature field, push button, date field, label
Data — repeat, conditional, include partial, text frame, merge field

Start from one of 31 starter templates, each available in 8 built-in themes with palettes tuned for WCAG contrast — then edit any theme and export your own.

Standards on the Way Out

The structure tree, alternate text, output intent and metadata are written while the document composes — tagged PDF/UA and archival PDF/A are how pages leave, not an export plug-in. Declare the target in Document > Output Standards; the export honors it and the app validates against it.

PDF/A-2b, 2u, 2a — archival: visual fidelity, Unicode text, tagged structure
PDF/A-3b, 3u, 3a — the PDF/A-2 levels plus embedded file attachments
PDF/A-4, 4e, 4f — the PDF 2.0 baseline, engineering, and attachments
PDF/UA-1, PDF/UA-2 — accessible structure, for PDF 1.7 and PDF 2.0
Tagged PDF — the full structure tree, with or without a declared level
WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 — the engine's content audit: contrast, alternate text, heading order
veraPDF built in — one click validates the rendered file against the declared level. veraPDF runs on Java, which is not included: any Java 8 or later works

Forms Are Real AcroForm

Drop fields from the palette — text, checkbox, radio, dropdown, signature, date — and they lay out like any block. They are real AcroForm fields, not drawn imitations: open the exported PDF in a viewer and type into them. Each field is tagged with its tooltip, so a fillable form stays accessible.

The Document Is Data

Repeat blocks loop over arrays, conditionals switch on fields, and {{tokens}} pull values into any text — point the document at a JSON data source and the layout you designed fills itself. A PageWright Studio file is a template for every future version of itself.

When the same document has to be produced unattended and at volume, run the file on PageWright, the server engine — it comes out exactly as you designed it.

Real Typesetting

Optional whole-paragraph line breaking for justified text, with hyphenation, kerning, and widow and orphan control
Threaded frames, and tables that split across pages without losing their headers
Deterministic output: the same document renders to the same geometry every time, so a file can be compared, reviewed and kept in version control beside the code that fills it