If you’ve generated PDFs from HTML, you’ll know the pain: headless Chrome in Docker, CSS hacks, content that flows over pages or table boundaries and other quality issues.The fundamental problem is that HTML was designed for screens, not print.We built Press, a markup-based document language where pages, content flows, and assets are first-class concepts. Content can flow across frames, columns, and pages without manual pagination. Pages are created dynamically based on the available content.Press templates separate layout from content. You can send markdown, Press markup, or a mixture of both to the API. Data can be sent in JSON, CSV, XML.Because Press is XML-based it can easily be generated by agents - some of our users are generating complete documents in a single shot, although the language is designed for repeatable automation.You can also use our MCP server, which enables models to design templates.A simple API call sends a markdown payload, which is injected into a flows body … /body /flows element in Press: curl -X POST https://api.papermill.io/v2/pdf?template_id=papermill-modern-report \ -H Authorization: Bearer $PAPERMILL_API_KEY \ -H Content-Type: text/markdown \ --data-binary @- \ -o report.pdf EOF # Q3 Revenue Summary Quarterly performance across our core product lines. | Product | Revenue | Growth | |----------|----------|--------| | Platform | £482,000 | +18% | | Add-ons | £124,000 | +42% | | Services | £67,000 | -3% | Strong quarter overall, driven by add-on adoption. EOF PDF output: https://mill.pm/hnPages and frames in Press can declare dependencies on a content flow like the body above. By default, if there’s no content in the flow then the frame or page won’t be generated. You can run flows between frames and pages, and combine multiple flows on a page - for example, a sidebar can run across pages until no content is left, then make room for body content. This makes it possible to implement complex layouts.You can mix markdown and Press: # Visualisation Sometimes it s *useful* to mix both markdown and Press: visualization ... /visualization The typesetter adapts to dynamic content (e.g. LLM output). For example, tables and columns can be automatically sized and Papermill will even auto-rotate a table and its page to fit if needed.Templates support components, repeating over data, document logic, and conditional styling. We mostly use an inline-styling approach, and provide the concept of a style “alias”, which is a bag of styling properties you can reuse and compose.Here’s an example template written in Press, our document language. It uses the first page layout until the sidebar flow is exhausted, then switches to the second: press document format= A4 page-margin= 2cm repeat flow= sidebar page frame direction= row frame padding-left= 1cm padding-right= 1cm flow name= body / /frame frame width= 20% background-color= #f5f5f5 padding= 0.5cm font-size= 9pt flow name= sidebar / /frame /frame /page /repeat repeat flow= body page flow name= body width= fill / /page /repeat /document flows body type= markdown lipsum paragraphs= 10 / /body sidebar type= markdown lipsum paragraphs= 3 / /sidebar /flows /press Papermill is a paid API with a free tier. Press is the document language.Try it for free: https://app.papermill.io/signup (no credit card needed)Docs including MCP setup: https://docs.papermill.ioData-only sandbox: https://app.papermill.io/demo.html (no email needed)We re a small team based in Manchester, UK. Tom (CTO) and I are happy to answer questions about the language design, the rendering engine, or anything else!