Why REFRACT PDF?
Why teams choose REFRACT PDF over general-purpose PDF tools - covering data sovereignty, schema-driven rendering, and enterprise integration.
What Makes REFRACT PDF Different
1. No Data Egress
REFRACT PDF runs entirely inside your Microsoft Azure environment. Your document payloads, template definitions, and rendered PDFs never leave your tenant.
Zero external dependencies at runtime
REFRACT PDF has no outbound HTTP calls during rendering. Every byte of your data stays within your tenant boundary.
2. Schema-Driven Rendering
Templates are defined as structured JSON - not WYSIWYG. Rendering follows the template and payload with no manual steps, no browser quirks, and no font substitution surprises.
3. Built for Automation
REFRACT PDF is designed to be called from Power Automate flows, Azure Logic Apps, or any HTTP client. Drop a JSON payload in, get a PDF out. No human-in-the-loop required.
4. Enterprise Layout Engine
First-class support for the constructs enterprise documents actually need:
- Multi-section layouts with independent columns and spacing
- Hierarchical tables with grouping, subtotals, and row-level formatting
- Signature zones with plain-text anchors that can be located by anchor-based e-signature tooling
- Approval pages with QR verification and tamper-evident metadata
- Automatic pagination with repeating headers and footers
5. Predictable Per-Tenant Pricing
REFRACT PDF is subscription-based and licensed per tenant - not per document, per user, or per API call. There is no metered usage or consumption-based billing that scales unpredictably with volume. One tenant subscription covers your entire organization, with no third-party SaaS dependency sitting between your data and your output.
Who Is REFRACT PDF For?
REFRACT PDF is the right fit when:
- You are operating in a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, legal, government) and cannot send document data to external services
- You generate documents that require consistent, auditable formatting - invoices, contracts, reports, certificates
- You want to automate document generation from Power Automate or Azure without building a custom rendering engine
- You already run on Microsoft 365 and want to keep your PDF infrastructure inside the same trust boundary
What REFRACT PDF Is Not
- Not a general PDF editor. REFRACT PDF generates PDFs from structured data. It can incorporate an existing PDF - extracting pages as images (EMBED mode) or appending its pages natively (APPEND mode, see PDF Assets) - but it does not open an arbitrary existing PDF for free-form annotation or editing.
- Templates are JSON definitions (
layoutSchema), authored either directly or through the Designer, REFRACT's visual template-building tool. - Not a document management system. REFRACT PDF renders and returns PDFs. Where you store or distribute them is up to your workflow.
What is REFRACT PDF?
REFRACT PDF is a cloud-native document rendering engine that converts structured JSON data into polished PDFs entirely within your Azure environment. No third-party SaaS. No data leaving your tenant.
Capabilities & Features
A comprehensive overview of REFRACT PDF's document rendering capabilities, enterprise features, async workflows, and monitoring tools - all in a single self-hosted engine.