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What is ARender

ARender is a document viewing, annotation, and rendition platform built by Uxopian Software. It lets users view, annotate, compare, redact, and assemble documents in a web browser, and provides a REST API for headless document rendering and conversion.

Who is it for​

  • Solution architects designing document management workflows
  • Developers embedding a document viewer into web applications
  • System administrators deploying and operating the platform
  • Business users collaborating through annotations, comparisons, and document assembly

What ARender does​

ARender handles two primary workloads:

Viewing and collaboration. Users open documents from connected repositories (Alfresco, IBM FileNet, and others), view them in a browser, and collaborate using XFDF-standard annotations. The viewer supports multi-format rendering, full-text search, bookmarks, hyperlinks, digital signature validation, document comparison, redaction, and a document builder for page-level assembly.

Backend rendition services. A set of microservices converts documents to viewable formats, renders pages as images, extracts text, and exposes these operations through a REST API. These services can run independently of the viewer for headless processing.

Supported document formats​

ARender renders over 100 document formats natively or via conversion:

  • PDF (including PDF/A, portfolios, and encrypted)
  • Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Publisher, Project)
  • LibreOffice / OpenDocument formats
  • Images (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, WebP, HEIF, BMP, DICOM, EPS)
  • HTML and SVG
  • Email (EML)
  • Video (MP4)
  • AFP (Advanced Function Presentation)
  • Plain text, RTF, vCard
  • XPS

See Supported formats for the complete matrix.

Architecture at a glance​

ARender runs as a set of Docker containers. A viewer connects to the Document Service Broker, which orchestrates backend microservices for conversion, rendering, and text extraction. All rendition services share a temporary file volume (/arender/tmp).

ARender Horizon is an npm package embedded as a Web Component in your application. It connects to the rendition backend to display and annotate documents.

See System architecture for details.

Next steps​

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