Show HN: Turn raw HTML into production-ready images for free
(html2png.dev)84 points by alvinunreal 9 hours ago
84 points by alvinunreal 9 hours ago
They'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.
It's not an image—it's an image on the edge.
No cruft. No legacy formats.
Just buttery smooth production readiness.
I’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
I 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.
This 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>
https://html2png.dev/api/blob/oTVGhhCc6rDZYQFDIE3EGkcKs-KO6J9-_DHs-jO2OJc-d23fb4f2.png
HTML to PNG:
chromium --headless --disable-gpu --screenshot=output.png --window-size=1920,1080 --hide-scrollbars index.html
chromium --headless --disable-gpu --no-pdf-header-footer --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --print-to-pdf=output.pdf index.htmlI’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!
that "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 where they use canvas? or is this something else ?
No, 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.
Why? 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.
Congrats 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%.