Plaque

Turn a guest CSV into print-ready place card PDFs. Everything runs in your browser — no account, no upload, no server. Your guest list never leaves your device.

• Design one card in a freeform editor. Mix fixed text with {{Column}} tokens from your CSV, in any element.
• Drop in a monogram, crest or venue mark as a PNG or JPEG. Fill the box and crop it by eye — drag the artwork, wheel to zoom — or fit it to the card, to the panel, or to its own natural size in one press. Shift keeps a box's shape while you resize it.
• Hide the sheet pane when you want the whole window for the card, and zoom in on the work. Anything that leaves the card, or straddles the fold, says so.
• Any card size, any fold position, custom bleed and margins — with layout suggestions that work out how to waste the least card stock.
• Tent cards print the back panel rotated 180°, so it reads from across the table.
• Names that do not fit shrink, wrap, or tell you which guests are a problem — they never quietly become illegible. Choose the point they shrink around.
• Icons mapped from any column — dietary, entrée, anything — with your own SVGs if you want them.
• Vector PDF with embedded fonts: text stays selectable and sharp at any size.
• Save the whole job — design, guest list and uploads — as one .plaque.json file you can move between machines.

New to Plaque? Start with the User Guide — how to build a card, lay out a sheet, and print it at the right size.

Development

npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:5173
npm run test       # vitest, including the PDF smoke test
npm run build      # static output in dist/, with both build gates
npm run sample     # writes sample-flat.pdf and sample-tent.pdf from the fixtures
npm run cli -- build fixtures/job.plaque.json -o out.pdf   # headless, same core

npm run build will not produce a bundle if either gate fails:

• Data gate (npm run validate:data) — a contributed preset with a bad field, or two presets with the same id, stops the build and names the file and the field.
• Offline gate (npm run gate:offline) — the built bundle is scanned for any host it could talk to, and for fetch, WebSocket, sendBeacon, XMLHttpRequest or EventSource. A guest list leaving the device is the one bug this project cannot ship, so it is checked mechanically rather than promised in a comment.

dist/ is a plain static bundle. It runs from any host, or straight off the filesystem.

How it fits together

A single scene graph in millimetres is the source of truth. Two renderers consume it and neither owns any layout logic:

CSV rows ─┐
          ├─> bindings ─> card scenes ─> paginate ─> sheets ─┬─> SVG (screen)
template ─┘                                                 └─> pdf-lib (export)

• src/core/ — pure TypeScript. No React, no DOM. All the geometry, text fitting, CSV and imposition logic, and nearly all the tests. core/job.ts is the whole pipeline in one function, which is why the browser and the CLI cannot drift apart.
• src/render/ — the two renderers. Read-only consumers of core/.
• src/state/ — zustand store, undo history and IndexedDB.
• src/ui/ — the sidebar panels and app chrome.
• src/data/ — contributed data packs as JSON: card sizes, pre-cut stock.
• templates/ — the starter gallery. Every file here is also a test fixture.

Three rules hold the design together:

1. Every stored coordinate is a millimetre, top-left origin, y downward.
2. src/render/pdf/renderPdf.ts is the only file that flips the y-axis for PDF's bottom-left origin.
3. Font size and line breaks are decided once, in src/core/text/fit.ts, from fontkit metrics — never from the browser's own text layout. That is what stops the preview and the printed sheet from disagreeing.

These are enforced, not just documented: src/invariants.test.ts fails the build if a second file flips the y axis, if anything but core/text/measure imports fontkit, if a renderer decides a size, or if core/ reaches for React or the DOM.