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Version: v2026.0.0

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).

The viewer is a standalone Spring Boot application that serves a GWT-compiled JavaScript frontend to the browser and hosts document connectors as JARs on its classpath. It connects to the rendition backend to display and annotate documents.

See System architecture for details.

ARender Horizon available

A React-based version of the ARender Viewer is now available, designed for web-native integration. If you are starting a new project or evaluating ARender, see the ARender Horizon documentation.

Next steps​

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