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> mind-bending D3

That's something that bugs me too. D3 is pretty amazing but is only accessible to coders.

> we’ve almost completely lost the art of offscreen rendering

markdown2.com is something I'm working on to address that. It lets you design markdown documents containing charts & diagrams, and then Save As HTML/PDF or SVG/JPG. There's also an API for generating them in bulk.

…with a headless browser, I suppose. Which is not ideal.

There are plenty of options to render SVG serverside, no idea why you think “we’ve almost completely lost the art”. For instance, with Apache Echarts: https://apache.github.io/echarts-handbook/en/how-to/cross-pl... Plus you can always use browser automation like playwright, though that’s more resource heavy.

Ideally in the future Ripl could support features like server-rendered SVGs and Offscreen Canvas. I already have a plan on how to go about tackling these two, I just sadly don't have the time...