Generating Images in JavaScript Without Using the Canvas API | Hacker News Reader

Generating Images in JavaScript Without Using the Canvas API

medium.com

106 pointspetercooper26 comments

Cool. Nice, creative work. Indexed PNGs seem unfortunately under utilized.

I happen to have just opened a PR to support indexed PNGs in node-canvas (HTML Canvas impl for node) based roughly on the proposed pixelFormat API [1,2] for the same reason that the space savings can be immense.

It's also straightforward to change the palette of an indexed PNG after it's encoded because you don't need to re-compress the body. This lets you do cool tricks with recoloring images.

[1] https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas/pull/935 [2] https://github.com/WICG/canvas-color-space/blob/master/Canva...

Decent image editors etc do often output indexed PNGs. And thankfully, modern viewers do actually support them.

I can't even tell you how many times I've re-implemented PPM file format in whatever language, to produce an image file, when no libraries were available to me. Dozens, easily.

That's an excellent idea. I wonder if it'd work with this scenario.

It's a really clever solution, kudos to them. Is there a limitation why they couldn't just have the notification point to a remote URL and update server-side using whatever solution they wanted? It wouldn't have been as elegant but may have been easier to build.

The main reason is that the phone will download the image each time you post a notification, and with 650 alerts throughout the night (for 650 constituencies) the user would end up downloading a lot of data with very little to show for it (since newer notifications replace the older ones).

But to add to that, it needed to be customised for different screen sizes. So we'd have to have generated a lot of versions server side.

I handcrafted GIFs back in the day, mostly by looking at generated files and fiddling with the hex. Lots of fun.

I'm curious if it would've been simpler to use it, albeit less efficient.

I had done a similar thing for PCM WAV files before Web Audio API was really a thing: http://www.seanmcbeth.com/synth/

Pretty sure that only runs in Chrome anymore.

Maybe I'm missing something but why not use SVG for some of this? Would be perfect for the lozenge pictures.

You can't use an SVG as an image in a notification. A real shame as it would have solved all the device pixel ratio problems, but the SVG spec is absolutely huge (and includes stuff like animation) so I'm not overly surprised that Android doesn't support it.

Hmm, I'm wondering if there's a way now to render an SVG (not the full spec) within a service worker e.g. using PngPong with https://github.com/canvg/canvg

Huh! That's a really fascinating library. My gut instinct is still that it would be a heavy lift, though. Without the Canvas API in the middle you'd need to reimplement pixel by pixel drawing of different shape/curves (PngPong literally only draws squares and copies sections of other images) anti-aliasing, etc. etc.

It would be a fascinating thing to work on, but the OffscreenCanvas API is coming to Chrome[1], so I suspect it would end up being a lot of work that would be obselete after not all that much time.

[1] https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5424182347169792

This might work for you. pure JS impl of canvas

https://github.com/joshmarinacci/node-pureimage

Interesting, I'll have to take a look. Thanks!

Android doesn’t support SVG, and only added support for VectorDrawables later on.

I tried making PNGs before from bytes but got stuck on CRC generation - the math just seemed way over my head.

Is there a simple way to explain CRC for someone with just a high school mathematics background?

Depends on where you went to high school. Did you have polynom division in school (most people have)? In that case, Wikipedia should be enough.

Otherwise, you’d probably have to learn some more advanced math first to understand CRC well enough to implement it.

I've always found "A Painless Guide to CRC Error Detection Algorithms" [1] from the zlib site pretty useful and easy to understand. Once you understand polynomial division, things start making a lot more sense.

[1] https://zlib.net/crc_v3.txt

Thank you, this looks great.

Nice creative hackery in the browser! Always great to see well written blog posts on pushing web browsers in new unexpected directions.

Hat off. Nice piece of engineering thinking.

Despite the fact that it's pretty good stuff, shouldn't the title says it's for Android notification ?

Author here. The post is a combination of two separate things: creating a PNG file via JavaScript typed arrays, then using that PNG in an (Android-specific) web notification.

I added a subtitle to the Medium post, but should have considered the fact that it won't show up anywhere else. Not sure it would fit if it was appended to the end of the title here.

That was the goal, but the underlying library is general-purpose.

Writing a minimal uncompressed PNG writer from scratch is a fun exercise; the spec is pretty clear and the only tricky part, really, is getting the uncompressed zlib part right, especially since the block sizes are undocumentedly little-endian, while everything else is big-endian.

Self-contained code for image generation and consumption can be pretty useful. It's one of the reasons that I like farbfeld, suckless's incredible simple binary image format, because libraries for processing it are essentially unnecessary since the format itself is so straightforward.

> especially since the block sizes are undocumentedly little-endian, while everything else is big-endian.

Yes! That stumped me for a long time. Along the way to solving it I found this great Stack Overflow answer where the creator of ADLER32 popped in to give some advice:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32633486/why-are-png-def...

"Also just realized that you are that Mark Adler."

That's a crucial point, though it doesn't affect how interesting the piece is. But since HN policy is to keep the original headline whatever it is I don't bother tweaking them anymore.

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