MiniApps: Document Creation Made Simple

The Problem with Traditional Tools

If you've ever tried creating a professional resume on Canva or building an invoice on template.net, you know the struggle. You spend hours dragging elements around, aligning text boxes, adjusting fonts, and fighting with layouts. As a non-designer, you're forced to become a graphic designer just to fill out a simple template. What should take 5 minutes ends up consuming your entire afternoon.

The irony? You're not actually designing anything new. You just want to enter your information into an existing template and generate a document. But traditional tools force you into a designer role, making simple data entry unnecessarily complex.

The MiniApps Solution

MiniApps flip this paradigm on its head. Instead of forcing you to manipulate design elements, they present you with a smart, purpose-built interface that understands exactly what information you need to provide. Think of it as the difference between editing a Word document in design mode versus simply filling out a well-designed form.

A MiniApp is a pair of two things: a data schema that defines what information is needed, and a dedicated user interface specifically designed to collect that information in the most intuitive way possible.

How It Works in Practice

Let's take a resume as an example. A resume has several distinct sections:

• Personal Information - a single set of fields (name, email, phone, address)
• Work Experience - a list where each job has multiple fields (company, position, dates, responsibilities)
• Education - another list with degree, institution, year, and achievements
• Skills - a simple list of competencies

In Canva, you'd be clicking into text boxes, copying and pasting elements to add a second job, struggling to keep formatting consistent, and hoping nothing breaks when you add that third position. It's tedious and error-prone.

With MiniApps, each section gets its own intelligent interface. Personal information? A clean form with validated email and phone fields. Work experience? An "Add Position" button that creates perfectly formatted entries, with easy reordering and editing. Education? The same smart list approach. Each MiniApp understands the structure of its data and presents the perfect UI for managing it.

Context-Aware Intelligence

Here's where it gets even better: different types of lists get different interfaces. The product list in an invoice template doesn't look like the experience list in a resume—because they shouldn't. An invoice needs quantity, price, and tax calculations with a running total. A resume needs dates, descriptions, and achievement bullets. MiniApps adapt their interface to match the specific needs of each section.

This is impossible with generic designer tools. Canva treats everything as design elements. MiniApps treat everything as structured data with purpose-built interfaces.

The DocMiral Difference

When you use a template in DocMiral, you're not fighting with design tools. You're having a conversation with smart forms that understand your document. Want to create a resume? Fill out clear, validated forms. Need an invoice? Enter products into a calculator-enabled list. Building a project proposal? Work through logically organized sections.

The result? What took hours in Canva takes minutes in DocMiral. And your output is consistent, professional, and error-free—because you were focused on your content, not battling with alignment and formatting.

For Template Creators

If you're building templates for DocMiral, MiniApps are integrated through Jinja2 template syntax using the mini() function. This function seamlessly connects your template design with the appropriate MiniApp interface, automatically handling the data flow between user input and document generation. For detailed implementation guidance, refer to our API documentation.