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Architecture diagram

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When you edit a document — for example, by rotating all pages — Document Engine saves a new asset for that document. It also updates all relevant annotations.

You rotate a document page and Document Engine stores the new PDF file.

  1. Your service requests that the Document Engine rotates all pages of the document. Document Engine retrieves the document from the asset storage for processing.
  2. Document Engine transforms the document, rotating all of its pages.
  3. Document Engine persists the transformed document in the asset storage without deleting the original. It returns the new document’s properties to your service.

Client-side content editing

Content editing is distinct from Document Engine’s server-side document-processing API. It runs through Nutrient Web SDK:

  1. Web SDK retrieves the document from Document Engine and prepares it for browser-side editing.
  2. The content editor modifies the PDF through Core/WASM commands in the browser.
  3. On save, Web SDK persists the result using update-source-document with an incremental update, or replace-source-document with the complete replacement PDF.

Separately, Document Engine exposes apply_instructions, which executes Build instructions and persists the resulting document. This supports server-side document transformations, but doesn’t provide a Build action for editing PDF text content.