Writing
Notes from running a rendering service
Print CSS, headless failure modes, and the incidents we would rather not repeat. Written by the people on call.
The postmortem is written but held back until its figures are confirmed.
The five ways a headless render silently produces a blank page
Fonts, lazy images, animation frames, print media queries — and the one that is always your own auth redirect.
Designing an HTML invoice that prints correctly
Repeating table headers, keeping the total block together, and margins that survive both A4 and Letter.
18 minutes of queued renders on June 2
A month-end burst met a bad autoscaling threshold. What we changed, and what we credited.
Rendering behind a login, four ways
Signed one-time URLs, cookie pass-through, service tokens, basic auth — and when each is a bad idea.
Merging four URLs into one paginated PDF
How continuous page numbering works across documents, and why gluing PDFs afterwards breaks font subsets.
Why your brand font disappears inside a container
Font caches, missing subsets, and the reason a Japanese company name prints as empty boxes.