←back to thread

Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)

(github.com)
233 points monax | 5 comments | 18 May 25 17:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.783s | source

We’ve been working on Vaev, a minimal web browser engine built from scratch. It supports HTML/XHTML, the CSS cascade, @page rules for pagination, and print-to-PDF rendering. It even handles calc(), var(), and percentage units—and yes, it renders Google.com (mostly).

This is an experimental project focused on learning and exploration. Networking is basic (http:// and file:// only), and grid layouts aren’t supported yet, but we’re making progress fast.

We’d love your thoughts and feedback.

1. quibono ◴[18 May 25 22:06 UTC] No.44024650[source]▶
Are you open to contributions? I would love if there was a non-chromium alternative to wkhtmltopdf!
replies(2): >>44024754 #>>44025546 #
2. 5- ◴[18 May 25 22:25 UTC] No.44024754[source]▶
like https://www.princexml.com/ ?
replies(1): >>44024888 #
3. edoceo ◴[18 May 25 22:49 UTC] No.44024888[source]▶
Yea, Prince is awesome. Not FOSS tho. I make some GPL or MIT licensed software and wish there was something as good a Prince with more open license.
4. flexagoon ◴[19 May 25 00:48 UTC] No.44025546[source]▶
wkhtmltopdf is not chromium though? "Wk" literally stands for WebKit.

There's also https://weasyprint.org/ which doesn't use any browser engine, but rather a custom renderer.

And both of those (and Prince) can be used as a backend by Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/)

replies(1): >>44050824 #
5. quibono ◴[21 May 25 12:36 UTC] No.44050824[source]▶
You're right, I think merged a few things together when writing the comment. What I meant is that (if you ignore PrinceXML and focus on FOSS) you're down to 3 options: - wkhtmltopdf - weasyprint - (headless) chromium with puppeteer et al.

The first one I found to be unreliable, the second one is super slow and the third can be annoying to work with.