atalogues, annual reports, magazines and price lists are still made the way they have been made for decades: in a proprietary file format, read faithfully by one vendor's software, rendered on that vendor's machines. Anyone who wanted to open, preview, generate or edit those pages programmatically had to rent the whole stack.
paged. opens it. The engine reads IDML — the interchange format InDesign writes — and lays it out the way InDesign does: the same line breaks, the same baselines, the same transparency. It is written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly and painted on WebGPU, so the work that used to need a server runs in a browser tab, on the machine of the person doing it.
On top of the engine sits an editor of the same class, and around the editor sit plugins for the work a publication actually contains: vectors, photographs, spreadsheets, databases, web content, Word manuscripts, slides and the formats they travel in.
