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Show HN: Turn raw HTML into production-ready images for free
- eastoeast 9mo agoThis is a great idea. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this, given I generate and screenshot so many “poster images” in html just like this. Haven’t played around a ton but seems intuitive. Nice work!
- xiaohanyu 9mo agoMaybe webp is a better target than png?
- dtagames 9mo agoIt's not. JPG, I could live with but please not webp.
- Mogzol 9mo agoWhy? I assume the intention is to show these images on a webpage somewhere. WebP is well-supported by browsers and can store lossless images at better compression ratios than PNG, so why not use it? I don't think using a lossy format like JPEG makes much sense. JPEG is a fine format for photos, but for HTML content rendered as an image I assume most people would want a lossless format so you don't get artifacts.
- benatkin 9mo agoNo, because their domain is png /s I thought webp would be better for this and checked again just to be sure, and yes, it would be better for this. WebP is quite well supported, albeit not as well supported as png, and it can have significantly smaller file sizes for the same lossless image as png.
- RyanShook 9mo agoNice! It definitely makes you wonder when is MCP actually needed vs just giving the LLM API calls to work with.
- chevman 9mo agoAny similar AI based services/agents that can take images/creative assets (eg Figma, Sketch, Adobe PS, etc files) and create production-ready emails and landing pages in HTML?
- geooff_ 9mo agoVery cool. Is there an option to self-host? This seems like it could be a cool agent skill.
- threeducks 9mo agoHTML to PNG: chromium --headless --disable-gpu --screenshot=output.png --window-size=1920,1080 --hide-scrollbars index.html Also works great for HTML to PDF: chromium --headless --disable-gpu --no-pdf-header-footer --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --print-to-pdf=output.pdf index.html
- Retr0id 9mo agoWhat differentiates production-ready images from regular images?
- apeters 9mo agoThey are cloud-native, of course.
- yeasku 9mo agoIs this post a joke?
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoDo they support also DeFi or Blockchain then?
- aembleton 9mo agoYes, and AI
- KellyCriterion 9mo ago++1 :-)) good one!!!
- RadiozRadioz 9mo agoThey're bedazzled by a little bit of marketing flair. Generally I find production-ready images have more synergy and tend to be web-scale. Often they're built from the ground up for AI & are blazing fast, at scale, and empower your team whilst unlocking new possibilities. As my sibling comment suggests, being cloud-native is a crucial factor too.
- 4ndrewl 9mo agoDownvoted for not starting with "Great question!" /s
- 9mo ago
- tbrownaw 9mo agoPlaywright behind a web server?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- franze 9mo agowell, you can create an image that reports the internal, this is what i got: - IP: 104.28.157.29 - Org: Cloudflare (AS13335) - Location: Narita, Chiba, Japan - Browser: Chrome 126.0.0.0 headless - Automation: Puppeteer/Playwright - navigator.webdriver: true - Platform: Linux x86_64 - CPU cores: 4 - WebGL: ANGLE + Vulkan 1.3.0 + SwiftShader - GPU: SwiftShader (software rendering) - Screen: 1024x768 virtual - DevicePixelRatio: 2 - Color depth: 16 bit - Window: 500x88 outer (headless) - Languages: en-US - Plugins: 5 - Frontend: Nuxt.js - Storage: ephemeral blob
- oefrha 9mo agoI’m afraid out of all the waiting strategies available in Puppeteer/Playwright, waiting a fixed period is the worst possible. Maybe consider exposing the proper waiting strategies, load/domcontentloaded/networkidle, maybe even the more fine-grained ones https://playwright.dev/docs/actionability https://playwright.dev/docs/actionability
- jihchi 9mo agoThis is cool! One use case is generating a Mermaid diagram as an image. For example, you can use the following HTML[^1]: <!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <body> <pre class="mermaid"> graph LR A --- B B-->C[fa:fa-ban forbidden] B-->D(fa:fa-spinner); </pre> <script type="module"> import mermaid from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mermaid@11/dist/mermaid.esm.min.mjs'; </script> </body> </html> Then html2png.dev will serve you: https://html2png.dev/api/blob/oTVGhhCc6rDZYQFDIE3EGkcKs-KO6J9-_DHs-jO2OJc-d23fb4f2.png [^1]: https://mermaid.js.org/config/usage.html#simple-full-example https://mermaid.js.org/config/usage.html#simple-full-example
- JimDabell 9mo agoWhy wouldn’t you just use Mermaid to generate the PNG directly?
- Garlef 9mo agoOne reason I could think of: Fewer dependencies that need integration
- JimDabell 9mo agoBy introducing a dependency on a third-party service with no SLA? This seems to make the dependency situation worse.
- mcny 9mo agoAh haha. I love this conversation of trying to find a product market fit in public. What if the input to the JavaScript (mermaid in this case) is not trusted to run on the end client machines but by running untrusted input on a sandbox (this service, or self hosted idk) is somehow acceptable and the output a blob of an image is acceptable to display on the actual client machines. Takes the planets to align just right and need us to squint just enough but I think we can find something if we look hard enough. But then mermaid can simply output PNG so you could run it as a worker... Thinking...
- reassess_blind 9mo agoI thought this was satire. Usually you want to go from image to HTML, not the other way around. I suppose it does have its uses, though.
- devmor 9mo agoIt certainly does, that's why it's been a common dev tool for a bit over 20 years. I'm not really sure what the point of OP making it a web app is, though.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoSo why comment?
- agentifysh 9mo agothat "Not MCP" is so refreshing it makes me laugh out loud it's literally waht i've been saying all along when I came across mcp "why can't i just give agent a prompt and it will run the rest api calls for me" there's still some MCPs which makes sense but we have it for literally everything when just a prompt will do the job! now on the topic of html2png i do wonder is this like the self-hostable version on github https://github.com/maranemil/HTML2Png https://github.com/maranemil/HTML2Png where they use canvas? or is this something else ?
- jumploops 9mo agoLove the simplicity and “Not MCP” callout (: Not that it matters, but curious what percentage of this service was “vibe-coded”?
- WilcoKruijer 9mo agoI’ve been doing this manually by having a static development-only route on my website and taking a “node screenshot” using the Chrome developer tools. This is definitely a better way, well done!
- me_bx 9mo agoCongrats on launching, beautiful design. I'm not sure of what "production ready" is supposed to mean here, but the demo image is not optimized, `optipng` command decreases its size by 53.21%.
- kristopolous 9mo agoalso don't ignore webp and avif ... those can really do wonders.
- alvinunreal 9mo agoThank you. Can add png compression too right.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoThe bots using these images apply their own compression anyway.
- the_arun 9mo agoCurious - How did you find the image is not optimized? Is there a tool to find it?
- me_bx 9mo agoI ran the command 'optipng' on the generated image, which recompresses the image optimally, keeping quality and decreasing file size.
- derefr 9mo ago> I'm not sure of what "production ready" is supposed to mean here Given this text at the bottom: > The high-performance HTML to PNG engine. Built for developers, agents, and automation. Completely free to use. All generated assets are public and ephemeral. ...I assume the implications are that: 1. this service will scale to meet request load without QoS degradation (i.e. it's probably running on FaaS infra), rather than being a fixed-size slowly-elastic cluster that would get choked out if your downstream service got popular and flooded it with thousands of concurrent requests 2. you can directly take the URLs the service spits out, and serve them to your downstream service's clients, without worrying much about deliverability, because there's an object store + edge CDN involved. In other words, it's not just a single headless-chromium instance running on a box somewhere; you could actually use this thing as an upstream dependency and rely on it. > the demo image is not optimized, `optipng` command decreases its size by 53.21% Given that the author's imagined use-case is giving non-multimodal LLMs a way to emit visuals (the prompt at the bottom of the page starts "When asked to create visuals, charts, or mockups"), I think their idea is that the resulting rendered images would more-likely-than-not only be requested once, immediately, to display the result to the same user who caused the prompt to be evaluated. Where, in that case, the metric of concern isn't "time+bytes cost for each marginal fetch of the resulting image from the CDN"; but rather "end-to-end wall-clock time required to load the HTML in the headless browser, bake the image, push it to the object store, and serve it once to the requesting user." OptiPNG would slightly lower that last "serve it once" cost, but massively inflate the "bake the image" time, making it not worth it. (I suppose they could add image optimization as something you could turn on — but "image optimization at the edge" is already a commodity product you can get from numerous vendors, e.g. Cloudflare.)
- rognjen 9mo agoIt's nice looking for sure but much more complex than using `wkhtmltox` with `pngquant`, `optipng` and/or ImageMagick `convert` locally - esp. since the learning curve seems to be about equivalent.
- randoments 9mo agoWhat is the use case for requiring this?
- mattrighetti 9mo agoDynamic og:image generator could be a use case. Think of the GitHub thumbnails where the PR number changes constantly and has to be reflected on the image preview
- albert_e 9mo agoThis looks interesting though niche -- am yet to think of a compelling use case. I am sure @simonw has some ideas :) -- he recently blogged about HTML tools which is also one or my favorite use cases for LLMs. Maybe similar to SVG generation, this could be a more powerful / flexible way to generate complex images / screen mockups and the like on-the-fly. PS: How do the economics work -- how is this free to use? PS2: The live HTML editor seems buggy. Cursor is off by one position and messes up editing. (chrome on windows)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- onion2k 9mo agoAlternatively, open devtools, press ctrl+shift+p (or cmd+shift+p on a mac) to open the command palette, search for 'screenshot' and choose 'Capture full size screenshot' to do the same thing on your browser. There's 'area screenshot' for selecting an area, 'screenshot' for the viewport', and even 'node screenshot' for capturing the selected DOM node.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoYeah and you can also take a picture with your phone. Or draw with pencil and paper.
- alvinunreal 9mo agoI just take pictures with my instant polaroid
- thatgerhard 9mo agoThis must be the hardest way to create an image online ever invented.
- stronglikedan 9mo agobut it's "high-performance"!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- xnx 9mo agoSharing in case anyone isn't familiar with this built-in capability: google-chrome --headless --screenshot=my_screenshot.png https://www.example.com https://www.example.com
- stronglikedan 9mo agoThis is for the dozen or so people that don't have Chrome installed.
- nabeards 9mo agoI personally haven't had Chrome installed anywhere in years. I think there are more than a dozen of us!
- DemocracyFTW2 9mo ago(checks list) --Mh, yah so, you've got a point there (scribbles, smiles, extends hand) --Welcome dear Sir or Madam, or, as we will call you, Number Thirteen!
- thekevan 9mo agoI have this PC for over 2 years and did not realize I didn't have Chrome installed until Google's Antigravity prompted me to do so for its agent. So it's installed now but still un-personalized like it was installed 5 minutes ago. I don't use it except with Antigravity.
- Lord_Zero 9mo agoIt looks like this app has helpful functions for size, format, and transparency that you can't do with the built in chrome command all at once without probably piping it through inagemagik or something. And even then maybe this site renders the html responsively before rasterizing.
- fuzzy2 9mo agoActually Chrome does everything. Not via command-line switches however, you need to use the DevTools protocol. For example using Playwright. You get PDFs and PNGs of any size and resolution (PPI). And I guess this is exactly what this service does under the hood.
- donohoe 9mo ago“Free”? What’s the catch, or how I can I be sure it will still be around in 3 months? No snark, genuinely curious as I would use this if I could count on it.
- leptons 9mo agoThe only tech you can trust to be around is the tech you control. And even then it's still a bit iffy if you didn't write all the code yourself and you host it on someone else's servers.
- Yash16 9mo agoWhat’s the purpose of creating this?
- scosman 9mo agoLooks great for opengraph images.
- dom96 9mo agoWhy HTML? Why not SVG? I created an svg to png API to generate open graph images a while back. It works pretty well and can be hosted on Cloudflare Workers for free. https://github.com/dom96/svg-renderer https://github.com/dom96/svg-renderer
- novoreorx 9mo agomicrolink's cards [1] I discovered years ago has similar functionality, and microlink itself [2] is much more sophisticated on leveraging a headless chrome. [1]: https://github.com/microlinkhq/cards https://github.com/microlinkhq/cards [2]: https://microlink.io/ https://microlink.io/
- _august 9mo agothis is very handy, thanks!