Frappe Charts VS satori

As a frontend dev who also works in UX and graphics from time to time, I find it helpful to be able to do both, looking at SVGs as both a vector graphics format and a human-readable XML. IME the workflow depends more on whether any SVG is meant to be illustrative (like art) or quantitative (like charts) or interactive and animated/mutable (like a game).

For something like this bell example (https://svg-tutorial.com/svg/bell), you can certainly hand-code it if you're really math-inclined and can estimate the formulas of curves just by looking at them, but for us mere mortals, it's easier to just draw out the curves in a graphics app then export as an SVG. And for things like the ringer (is that what you call it? the orange ball thing at the bottom of the bell that strikes the bell to make the sound), being able to visually draw it on a canvas, change its size, drag it around and play with its colors and dimensions, etc. is really helpful. Figma is fine for simpler graphics, but it's really more of a UX tool than a graphic design tool, and Illustrator is a lot more powerful. Inkscape is a FOSS option.

In other circumstances, though, manipulating the SVG XML directly is also very helpful. Let's say you want to programatically generate a bar chart. If you have a big dataset, it's going to take a designer forever to manually plot them and change them every time the data changes. But it's easy for a dev to use Javascript (or any language) to draw each rectangle, programmatically adjust their heights and colors based on the data, add tooltips, etc. And that way you can dynamically update them in real-time whenever the data changes (like if the user selects a different date range, or new events come in). A lot of this is made easier by libs like https://frappe.io/charts or https://apexcharts.com. But before you take that approach, you should know that for complex charts, sometimes Canvas rendering (or just generating graphics in the backend) can be more performant than SVG.

SVGs can also be animated and interactive, not just with CSS transitions but by directly manipulating the XML geometries, like http://snapsvg.io/demos/ or https://www.svgator.com/ or https://codepen.io/collection/XpwMLO/. This is fine for product pages and such, but for really graphics-intensive apps (full games) it's probably slower than other rendering pipelines. (Not my specialty, won't speculate too much.)

TLDR Drawing them in a graphics app is usually easier for the designers, but the XML can be programmatically manipulated afterward to great effect.

charts: https://frappe.io/charts

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I've used satori [0] on the backend with TypeScript/Deno to render JSX as an SVG (which is then rendered to a PNG).

Satori is meant for rendering Open Graph images (e.g. the little images that come up when you post a link on Twitter/Slack/Facebook), but I found that it works well for rendering arbitrary images. It supports a subset of modern CSS, including flexbox.

My use case is posting match reports for League of Legends into a Discord text channel, e.g. person X just played a match, here are their stats.

It's quite nice because there are almost zero server-side native dependencies (the one exception is the library to convert svg -> png requires some native libraries).

Here's what a match report looks like: [1]

Here's an example of what the JSX looks like: [2]

[0]: https://github.com/vercel/satori

[1]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/glitter/blob/main/assets/p...

[2]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/glitter/blob/main/packages...

Another way is to write HTML/CSS and use satori [0] to convert that to SVG. It's meant for Open Graph images (the images that show up when you link a site in Discord, Slack, Twitter, etc.), but it works quite well for anything.

This is obviously not as flexible as true SVG, but it is familiar to author for anyone who's written a React application. I've used it on the backend to generate match reports for League of Legends [1]

[0]: https://github.com/vercel/satori

[1]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/glitter-boys

Install the @vercel/og package. This library is designed to convert React code into PNG images. It is built on Satori, a library that converts HTML and CSS into SVGs.

Examples are available in the Vercel OG Playground.

In this version, we no longer use Puppeteer to capture HTML and return images. Instead, we utilize the @vercel/og library, which employs Satori as its core engine. Satori is a library that converts HTML and CSS into SVG.

This is made possible thanks to the Dynamic Open Graph Image Generation feature introduced with Next.js version 13.3, and the new Metadata API. In summary, it involves generating images using code (in our case, TSX, HTML, and CSS) with the help of the libraries @vercel/og (already integrated in the App router) and Satori. Satori converts HTML and CSS to SVG, and then resvg-js converts the SVG to a PNG image. All of this in just a few milliseconds!

Here you are returning an ImageResponse instead of the Response, alternatively you can also extend the request and response web api using 'NextRequest' and 'NextRespone', to do that you can import them using import { NextResponse, NextRequest } from 'next/server';, though for this example it is not required. Now if you refresh your browser you will get an image generated by your 'route.js' at request time. Well we are almost done. You can render whatever dynamic data in your image you want and customize your image using og playground, you can even generate 'SVG' on request as the og image. For this example we will fetch a random number from random.org api, then we will use that number as an id and fetch an image from Lorem Picsum, with the same image url we will fetch the description for the image from the Alt Image Generator and generate an image on request with the image that we fetched and the description we have fetched and use it in a design to create the og image. Kind of like that.

Use Vue files to generate SVG images by Satori. The image can be generated by running ESM script or CLI.

I'm not familiar with it but looks like it's made with nodejs, node uses the same js engine used by chrome, node renders the template and converts it to plain html/css and then they use this library to convert it to png but in the library github page it says that they don't support everything so it's kinda similar to xhtml2pdf or weasyprint