echarts VS node-canvas

ECharts was originally a Baidu project, released under https://github.com/ecomfe/echarts (ecomfe = "E-commerce frontend"?). They still maintain some of the auxiliary libraries.

I've been using it since around ... 2018-ish[0]? ... as a replacement for Google Charts. It was my first time using a big library from one of the Chinese tech giants -- basic docs and tutorials in English, then all the advanced stuff (and comments) written in Chinese. I was impressed by how comprehensive the charts library was, and how they'd obviously invested a lot of brainwork into the configuration system. IMO it's one of the highest-quality data visualization libraries in JavaScript unless you're willing to dive deep into something like d3.js.

The blog post's author describes running echarts in a headless Chrome, though, which seems insane to me. It's JavaScript rendering to a -- can't it run in Node with https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas ?

[0] A small publicly-accessible example: https://john-millikin.com/reddit-front-page-2018#by-domain

If you're interested in node-compatible canvas implementations, there are several:

* canvaskit-wasm, from the skia project. I don't think it's gpu-accelerated: https://github.com/google/skia/tree/main/modules/canvaskit/n...

* @napi-rs/canvas. This is the fastest binding: https://github.com/Brooooooklyn/canvas?tab=readme-ov-file#pe...

* node-canvas. Uses Cairo instead of Skia: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas

Assuming SWR (stale while revalidate) is working, we could definitely use the ability to edit images in workers. We would need support for node canvas or something similar.

So at this point, I have all the images and the data required to align the images. I used node-canvas to do that. So here's how I aligned the images:

ECharts was originally a Baidu project, released under https://github.com/ecomfe/echarts (ecomfe = "E-commerce frontend"?). They still maintain some of the auxiliary libraries.

I've been using it since around ... 2018-ish[0]? ... as a replacement for Google Charts. It was my first time using a big library from one of the Chinese tech giants -- basic docs and tutorials in English, then all the advanced stuff (and comments) written in Chinese. I was impressed by how comprehensive the charts library was, and how they'd obviously invested a lot of brainwork into the configuration system. IMO it's one of the highest-quality data visualization libraries in JavaScript unless you're willing to dive deep into something like d3.js.

The blog post's author describes running echarts in a headless Chrome, though, which seems insane to me. It's JavaScript rendering to a -- can't it run in Node with https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas ?

[0] A small publicly-accessible example: https://john-millikin.com/reddit-front-page-2018#by-domain

node-pre-gyp ERR! install response status 404 Not Found on https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas/releases/download/v2.11.0/canvas-v2.11.0-node-v93-darwin-unknown-arm64.tar.gz

Another approach is it to create a background image and insert the texts and the metadata with a canvas library like node-canvas. This approach is very well described in this Learn With Jason episode. But with a canvas library we have to specify on which coordinates we want to render our texts and it does not wrap automatically if it becomes to long.

Never used it but probably this: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas

I found this issue: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas/issues/1974 and somebody commented with a link about node buffers. So I decided to test these parts.

Some popular Node.js libraries for manipulating images are node-canvas and sharp.

node.js + imagemagick + node canvas + node canvas libraries (depends on your OS)