I built a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine

This is what happens when a film director gets frustrated with software that should just work. cosmiciron—one of those rare builders who actually uses the tools they create—got tired of copy-pasting their screenplay back into clunky software just to export a PDF. So they did what any rational person would do: they built their own typesetting engine from scratch.

VMPrint is a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine that spits out bit-perfect PDFs without needing Headless Chrome or any of that heavy machinery. It runs everywhere—from Cloudflare Workers to the browser, lightweight and deterministic. But here's the thing that made this personal: cosmiciron writes in mixed languages, so standard markup like Fountain was a non-starter. They invented their own Markdown syntax that mirrors actual screenplay structure, and then had to solve problems that nobody else was solving. We're talking true multilingual text shaping and complex contextual pagination—the kind that automatically injects (MORE) at the bottom of a page and (CONT'D) at the top when a character's dialogue gets split across a page break. That's not a nice-to-have in screenwriting; that's the industry standard. And you can't do it when your layout engine is a black box.

Most developers would just whine about the tools. cosmiciron went zero-to-whole-ass typesetting engine. That's the move. The static demos are live on the GitHub page—go see for yourself. This is what happens when you refuse to accept "good enough."