Three different XBRL Renderers

I was trying to open an iXBRL file with arelle. I learned there are at least three different renderers/iXBRL viewers…

The three types of renderers/iXBRL viewers, corresponding to three different arelle “plugins”

1. Edgar Renderer All
   • The SEC’s original renderer
   • Renders plain XBRL
   • contained in the arelle repo
2. EdgarRenderer
   • The SEC’s iXBRL viewer
   • located in a separate repo
   • described in this video from XBRL US
3. ixbrl-viewer
   • Workiva’s ixbrlviewer
   • located in a separate repo

I was confused about #2 and #3 because I couldn’t find them when running arelle from the source, only when running the pre-built arelle executable.

That’s because the Arelle github workflow for the Windows build includes extra steps to checkout Arelle/EdgarRenderer and Workiva/ixbrl-viewer .

Great to learn!