A reporting engine is easy to like at three pages. This post measures one at a thousand. The numbers come from one laptop and one definition, so read them as a single data point, not a promise about your hardware.

The setup

The definition is the statement template , unchanged except for one added group. It opens a group per month, and each group footer totals that month's charges and credits. The data is 35,000 account movements over three years, so the walk opens 36 groups. The next row always pays the invoice before it, which keeps the running balance a realistic width.

Rendered to A4, that's 1,005 PDF pages.

The machine is an Apple M1 Pro with 32 GB, on macOS 26.6.2 and Node 24.18.0. The engine is quario 0.14.0. The targets are @quario/html 0.13.0, @quario/pdf 0.13.0, @quario/xlsx 0.12.0 and @quario/docx 0.5.0. The runs set no license key, so every page carries the evaluation watermark.

A bare pdf() draws in the base-14 faces.…