Say hi to Paperwall, a design tool that fits in one HTML file

Manohar Y S — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 17:03:42 +0000

I kept needing a quick poster, a slide, an invitation, and kept bouncing off tools that wanted an account, a subscription, or a watermark in the corner. So I built Paperwall.

What it does. Pick a template, change the words, download. PNG, PDF, PPTX, GIF or video. Posts, stories, slides, posters, invitations, business cards. 397 templates, 92 fonts, and a brand kit so your colors follow you around.

Where it runs. On your device. The whole app is one HTML file: open manoharys.github.io/paperwall in a tab, or download paperwall.html from the releases page and double-click it. Both work offline. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload to.

The nerdy bit. No framework, no bundler, no runtime dependencies. A short script links the modules into one file and hashes every inline script for a strict Content Security Policy. The PDF writer, PPTX writer, GIF encoder, zip, deflate and Brotli decoder are all in the repo, small and unit-tested. And 181 features each have a Playwright test named after them. The README scoreboard is generated from the test run, so it cannot claim something works when it does not.

Come build it with me. It is MIT, and the easiest ways in are templates, icons and translations (nine languages so far, yours is probably missing). There is a short list of good first issues at github.com/manoharys/paperwall.

Try it, break it, tell me what the PDF got wrong. I am in the comments.

DEV Community: Manohar Y S

Say hi to Paperwall, a design tool that fits in one HTML file