Our Licence, and What It Lets You Do
You buy the right, for your company, to use this engine inside its own software, paid once, with no end date. What your own programmers write around it stays yours, entirely, and no part of it ever has to be published. The full text is on this site, and you can read it before paying anything.
Your own code stays yours
This is the one that costs companies money, so it comes first.
Some software is given away on terms that reach into whatever it is put inside. Put a piece like that into your invoicing program and, depending on the terms, you can end up owing the world the source of your invoicing program. Companies discover this years later, when the program has grown around the piece and taking it out means taking apart the thing that makes their money.
Nothing here works that way. Our engine is sold, not given, and what you pay for is the right to keep your own work to yourself. Your programs stay closed if you want them closed. You publish nothing. You owe nobody a source file. No obligation travels from us to you.
What the Licence Lets You Do
- Use the engine inside your own products, for the documents your company sends its own customers.
- Install it on as many machines as you like — your developers' laptops, your build machines, your servers, and the machines your own product runs on. Nobody counts them.
- Keep using the version you bought for as long as you want. A licence bought outright has no end date, and every update inside the version you bought costs nothing.
- Read the whole licence on this site before paying anything, with no account to create and nobody to talk to first.
What the Licence Does Not Let You Do
A page that only lists permissions is not a licence, it is an advertisement. Here is the other half.
- You may not sell the engine as your product. Inside your own product, yes; as a component passed on to other developers, no.
- You may not hand it on, rent it out, lend it or publish it. Not the files, and not your licence key.
- You do not own the engine. What you buy is the right to use it. It stays ours, and so does the right to sell it to somebody else.
- The next major version is a new purchase. Anybody who already owns a licence pays 50% of what that licence cost them. Everything inside the version you bought is free.
One Licence, One Company
A licence covers the company that bought it. If several companies in your group will each create documents with it, tell us how the group is structured and we will fit the licence to it.
Technically
No copyleft anywhere in the dependency tree. Every component the engine is built on is under permissive terms, and a check refuses the build if one that is not ever enters it. The full licence texts are gathered in one file our team hands over on request, so your legal team can read them rather than take our word for it.
The licence key is a signed token verified offline against a public key compiled into the binary. There is no activation server, no lease, no renewal handshake and no telemetry. A build machine with no route to the internet is a supported case.
A build with no licence key is not the same build with a watermark added. It puts a watermark on every page it creates, and it draws the words as shapes rather than as letters, so nothing can be lifted out of them. Here is what it refuses outright, naming the key that covers each: an object you place yourself, a link that leads to a piece of the document's structure, a claim of accessibility or of the archival level A, sealing a file that already exists, filling one in, adding pages to one, giving one a signature field, taking a page from another document that holds more than ten thousand words or whose words cannot be counted, and setting text in any of the fourteen fonts all reading software already carries, in a Type 1 font, or in letters the program draws itself.
Five more it does quietly, and they are worth knowing before a trial is taken for the finished thing: no font is carried inside the file, no form is written, no structure is written, every letter becomes a shape, and nothing warns you about what a font's own licence allows. What a licence key buys is therefore the document itself, not the absence of a watermark. A copy running under a key, for its part, refuses to add to a document a page created without one.
Nothing delivered records what you create, and nothing about your usage reaches us unless you send it yourself to the service that creates PDFs on our machines. With the library and the server, the question does not arise: no code path could send it. That is also the answer to any GDPR question: we hold no personal data of yours, because none of it ever reaches us.
The Full Text
The terms of sale state all of it, in the words we would use before a court.
The Terms of Sale, in Full What You Pay, and for How Long What Becomes of the Documents You Send Changing the Library That Writes Your Documents