Dropflow
Dev tools
layout engine
SHOW HN2024
How HN took it
16 positive, 17 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 8 critical, out of 42 comments about the project. Thread score +0.27.
Idea: 13 for, 2 againstDesign: 0 for, 2 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Useful for server-side PDF generation without browser overhead
From 1 comment
This is an amazing piece of work. Thanks for making this open-source. The default way of generating beautiful PDFs in the backend these days is, running a headless browser and…
lewisjoe on HN
Impressive craftsmanship and useful for canvas text rendering
From 2 comments
This is pure craftsmanship. A heavy undertaking TBH, kind of reinventing browser flow on top of browser primitives.
wg0 on HNThis is incredible --- @chearon thank you for open sourcing this! I think most folks probably don't realize how difficult it is to go from HTML -> PNG programmatically. You get…
eob on HN
Objections
No flexbox or grid support limits usefulness
From 2 comments
It doesn’t support flex box? I really can’t tell what the purpose of this library is then.
lloydatkinson on HNTruly a service to the world. I think this is a classic example of "somebody ought to do $X" and nobody ever having done it. Thanks. As someone who loves working with CSS for…
atoav on HN
Accessibility for screen readers is unclear
From 1 comment
this wouldn't be accessible would it? For example to screen readers, so just wondering what the use case is over accessible tech
joelanman on HN
Requests
Support for img and table tags
From 1 comment
Are you planning to add support for the missing standard tags like img and table (both very useful for pdf rendering)?
jasonjmcghee on HN
Pagination and @page support for PDFs
From 1 comment
This looks great. As you mention PDF, do you plan to support the various @page properties that add pagination? For example like pagedjs[0] but native? Major usecases are books…
Vt71fcAqt7 on HN
Integration with web-platform-tests
From 1 comment
Opera switched from Presto to Blink, too. Very fun project! Did you ever consider integrating with web-platform-tests? It's shared between all the common browser vendors, and…
Sesse__ on HN
Questions
How suitable is it for a text editor and what is the latency
From 1 comment
How suitable would this be for a text editor of sorts, and what latency would one expect? Using the demo it's difficult to gauge the latency by just eyeballing it.
YorickPeterse on HN
What is the API to produce SVG
From 1 comment
What is the API to produce SVG?
foreigner on HN
Alternatives named
Headless browsers like Chrome
From 1 comment
This is an amazing piece of work. Thanks for making this open-source. The default way of generating beautiful PDFs in the backend these days is, running a headless browser and…
lewisjoe on HN
Weasyprint, wkhtmltopdf, DocRaptor/Prince
From 2 comments
Did you try Weasyprint?
phonon on HNWe use docraptor based on princexml engine but haven’t tried a huge pdf. We generate 20-30 page pdfs sometime and it works great.
nojvek on HN
Satori, Sciter, litehtml, Flying Saucer
From 4 comments
I've used satori [0] on the backend with TypeScript/Deno to render React JSX + tailwind CSS as an SVG (which is then rendered to a PNG). Of course you could use another flavor of…
shepherdjerred on HN> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries:…
chearon on HNThere is also HTML/CSS layout engine litehtml (https://github.com/litehtml/litehtml) and even a full-blown web engine in JS: WebKit.js (https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js)
niutech on HNGreat achievement, congratulations! This reminds me of flying saucer, a CSS render written in pure Java. Successfully used it in multiple projects for rendering PDFs in the past.…
fgutmann on HN