Getting Started

Overview

marknative takes Markdown text and renders it into paginated PNG or SVG images — without a browser, Chromium, or DOM.

The rendering pipeline:

Markdown source
  → parse (CommonMark + GFM)
  → typed document model
  → block & inline layout engine
  → pagination
  → native 2D canvas painting
  → PNG / SVG

Installation

npm

npm install marknative

bun

bun add marknative

pnpm

pnpm add marknative

Native dependency: marknative uses skia-canvas as its paint backend. Prebuilt native binaries are bundled for macOS, Linux, and Windows — no additional setup is needed.

Basic Usage

import { renderMarkdown } from 'marknative'
import { writeFileSync } from 'node:fs'

const markdown = `
# Hello, marknative

A native Markdown rendering engine that produces **paginated PNG pages**
without a browser.

- CommonMark + GFM support
- Deterministic layout and pagination
- PNG and SVG output
`

const pages = await renderMarkdown(markdown)

console.log(`Rendered ${pages.length} page(s)`)

for (const [i, page] of pages.entries()) {
  writeFileSync(`page-${i + 1}.png`, page.data)
}

Each element of pages is a RenderPage object with a format field and a data field.

Rendered output:

SVG Output

Pass format: 'svg' to get SVG strings instead of PNG buffers:

const pages = await renderMarkdown(markdown, { format: 'svg' })

for (const [i, page] of pages.entries()) {
  writeFileSync(`page-${i + 1}.svg`, page.data)
}

Single-Image Output

Use singlePage: true to render the entire document into one image instead of paginating:

const [page] = await renderMarkdown(markdown, { singlePage: true })
writeFileSync('output.png', page.data)

See Single-Page Mode for details.

Requirements

• Node.js ≥ 18 (or Bun)
• Prebuilt skia-canvas binary for your platform (bundled automatically)