A commercial invoice
A commercial invoice: letterhead, logo, a billed-lines table, totals, and a QR code that pays it by SEPA transfer.
The papers a business sends out every day, written by the machine that already holds the figures.
An invoice, a delivery note, a payslip, a contract, a certificate, a boarding pass, a sheet of shelf labels. These are whole documents rather than pieces of one: each comes out as a file anybody can open, print, send by e-mail or file away, on any machine, without owning any particular program.
Nothing on them is typed twice. The amounts, the addresses and the dates are read out of the system that already holds them — the order, the payroll, the stock list — so the total printed on the page is the total in the accounts, and the two cannot drift apart.
Every one of these is a real PDF this library wrote, with the source that wrote it.
A commercial invoice: letterhead, logo, a billed-lines table, totals, and a QR code that pays it by SEPA transfer.
The note that travels with the goods: a barcode against each article, a box the receiver ticks, and the consignment's own code.
A payslip: eighteen contribution lines with employee and employer shares, the month against the year to date.
A services agreement over two pages, ending in signature, name and date fields a reader fills in.
A landscape certificate whose border and seal are drawn line by line rather than placed as pictures.
A boarding pass carrying the IATA BCBP string a gate scanner reads.
A sheet of die-cut shelf labels, priced and barcoded, with cut marks in the margins.