Typesetting Without Code: A Drag-and-Drop Visual PDF Designer — Part I

Production typesetting often requires external tools and technical skill. (Part I)

Introduction

This work describes a visual designer where article PDFs are composed by dragging blocks — title, abstract, authors, colophon, body — choosing colours and fonts and hiding sections, all without code.

Method and Design

The design is stored as a configuration document and rendered server-side into a formatted PDF, consistent with the journal's identity.

Discussion

A live preview lets the editor see changes on a real article before saving.

Advanced users retain full HTML/CSS control when the visual designer is not enough.

Generated PDFs carry tables and images imported from authors' Word files.

Conclusion

Typesetting thus stops being a technical bottleneck.

This part demonstrates the platform's approach on a concrete journal example; the aim is to meet the complex requirements of scholarly publishing with a simple, sustainable architecture. Future work will examine how the model behaves at larger scale and across disciplines.