17 comments

  • me_bx 3 hours ago
    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%.

    • kristopolous 1 hour ago
      also don't ignore webp and avif ... those can really do wonders.
    • alvinunreal 59 minutes ago
      Thank you. Can add png compression too right.
  • albert_e 47 minutes ago
    This 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)

  • Retr0id 7 hours ago
    What differentiates production-ready images from regular images?
    • RadiozRadioz 5 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.

      • ludicrousdispla 3 hours ago
        If I need more flair can I embed the image in a new html page and then create another image from that?
      • 4ndrewl 4 hours ago
        Downvoted for not starting with "Great question!" /s
    • apeters 6 hours ago
      They are cloud-native, of course.
      • KellyCriterion 1 hour ago
        Do they support also DeFi or Blockchain then?
      • yeasku 2 hours ago
        Is this post a joke?
    • back2reddit 4 hours ago
      It's not an image—it's an image on the edge.

      No cruft. No legacy formats.

      Just buttery smooth production readiness.

      • b0ner_t0ner 1 hour ago
        > buttery smooth

        But buttery bloated if the images don't run OptiPNG before exporting.

      • andrecarini 2 hours ago
        Thanks ChatGPT
      • fainpul 3 hours ago
        [flagged]
  • oefrha 6 hours ago
    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
    • Retr0id 6 hours ago
      I did some tests and it didn't seem like a fixed wait, when I kept making network requests the render timed out entirely.
      • oefrha 5 hours ago
        I made the comment based on the delay parameter (“Wait time in ms.”) in the API. I didn’t test so don’t know what the default behavior is.
  • randoments 3 hours ago
    What is the use case for requiring this?
    • mattrighetti 1 hour ago
      Dynamic 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

  • rognjen 3 hours ago
    It'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.
    • mewpmewp2 1 minute ago
      Won't you need to install extra libraries for these?
    • krick 2 hours ago
      Yeah, I thought that as well. So I was wondering if that's some kind of a joke, or maybe modern html is so fucked up that all usual solutions became obsolete since the last time I did that.
  • reassess_blind 5 hours ago
    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.
    • devmor 5 hours ago
      It 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.
  • jihchi 6 hours ago
    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>
    
    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
    • JimDabell 5 hours ago
      Why wouldn’t you just use Mermaid to generate the PNG directly?
      • Garlef 4 hours ago
        One reason I could think of: Fewer dependencies that need integration
        • JimDabell 3 hours ago
          By introducing a dependency on a third-party service with no SLA? This seems to make the dependency situation worse.
          • mcny 11 minutes ago
            Ah 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...

  • geooff_ 7 hours ago
    Very cool. Is there an option to self-host? This seems like it could be a cool agent skill.
    • threeducks 4 hours ago
      HTML 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
  • tbrownaw 7 hours ago
    Playwright behind a web server?
    • franze 39 minutes ago
      well, 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
  • WilcoKruijer 3 hours ago
    I’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!
  • agentifysh 5 hours ago
    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 ?

  • eastoeast 9 hours ago
    This 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!
  • RyanShook 8 hours ago
    Nice! It definitely makes you wonder when is MCP actually needed vs just giving the LLM API calls to work with.
  • jumploops 5 hours ago
    Love the simplicity and “Not MCP” callout (:

    Not that it matters, but curious what percentage of this service was “vibe-coded”?

  • xiaohanyu 9 hours ago
    Maybe webp is a better target than png?
    • benatkin 8 hours ago
      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.

    • dtagames 8 hours ago
      It's not. JPG, I could live with but please not webp.
      • Mogzol 6 hours ago
        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.
        • kaizenb 6 hours ago
          Definitely should be WebP.
  • chevman 8 hours ago
    Any 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?