Templates

May 25, 2026 · View on GitHub

⚠️ Naming clarification. This is the layered template architecture (data / theme / components / widgets / presets), the going-forward canonical pattern. Package: com.demcha.compose.document.templates.cv.v2.

Not to be confused with the older v1.6 "Templates v2" surface (CvSpec, CvBuilder, presets with BusinessTheme) — that lives in templates/v1-classic/ and still ships alongside this one.

The canonical going-forward pattern for building business documents on GraphCompose. CV is the reference implementation today (com.demcha.compose.document.templates.cv.v2); invoice, cover-letter, proposal, and any new template family will follow the same shape as they're migrated.

This is the entry point. Pick the doc that matches your goal.

Pick your path

🆕 You're new to GraphCompose and templates

Start with quickstart.md — 5 minutes of orientation: what GraphCompose templates are, why they're layered, and a copy-paste example that renders a CV to a PDF.

👤 You want to render a document with your own data

You like an existing preset (Boxed Sections, Minimal Underlined, Modern Professional). Now you just want to feed it your name, your experience, your skills.

→ using-templates.md

You'll learn the CvDocument builder API, the built-in section types (paragraph / grouped skills / rows / entries), how slots place sections into columns, and how to swap a theme (colours / fonts / glyphs) without forking a preset.

🎨 You want a custom visual style on top of v2

Existing presets aren't quite your design. You want a new look — different section title style, different alignment, different colour palette — but still using the v2 building blocks.

→ authoring-presets.md

You'll learn the widget cookbook (Headline, ContactLine, SectionHeader), the 12-line compose() pattern, when to drop down to inline DSL, and how to ship a new preset as ~150 lines that anyone can read end-to-end.

🛠 You're adding a new template family to the library

You're a GraphCompose maintainer or contributor. You want to bring invoice-v2, cover-letter-v2, or a new document type onto the same 5-layer pattern that CV uses.

→ contributor-guide.md

You'll get the package convention (<name>/v2/data / theme / components / widgets / presets), naming rules, test expectations, doc expectations, and a worked checklist for a new template family from empty folder to merged PR.

The 5-layer pattern at a glance

presets/      composition: data + theme + widgets → DocumentTemplate
   │ compose from
   ▼
widgets/      LEGO bricks: Headline, Subheadline, ContactLine, SectionHeader, …
   │ delegate to                                  read tokens from
   ▼                                              ▼
components/   internal renderers + primitives    theme/    palette
                                                            typography
                                                            spacing
                                                            decoration
   │ render
   ▼
data/         records describing what to render (no styling)

Every layer has one job. Layers below don't know about layers above. Adding a new theme variant, a new widget, a new section subtype, or a new preset each touches one layer and leaves the others alone.

The detailed contract for each layer is in contributor-guide.md.

What this pattern is not

❌ Not a migration mandate. Existing v1 templates (cv/spec, cv/builder, cv/presets) continue to work and ship. The layered pattern is for new templates and major rewrites.
❌ Not a framework with magic. Every file is plain Java records + static helpers. No reflection, no annotations, no codegen.
❌ Not coupled to CV. The pattern is domain-agnostic; CV is just the first family migrated. Invoice or cover-letter would use the same five folders with their own data shapes inside.
❌ Not a UI framework. No state, no events, no lifecycle. Templates render static PDFs from immutable data.