Marknative

marknative — Markdown to PNG/SVG renderer

marknative renders Markdown (CommonMark + GFM + LaTeX math) to paginated PNG or SVG pages without a browser. Runs entirely server-side via skia-canvas.

Installation

npm install -g marknative
# or run without installing:
npx marknative <file.md>

Basic usage

# Render file → page-01.png, page-02.png … next to the source
marknative README.md

# Write to a directory
marknative README.md -o out/

# Single output file
marknative README.md -o README.png

# SVG output
marknative README.md -f svg -o diagram.svg

# Pipe from stdin
cat notes.md | marknative -o preview.png
echo "# Hello" | marknative -f svg

All flags

Built-in themes: light, dark, github, solarized, sepia, rose, nord, dracula, ocean, forest

JSON mode — for agents and scripts

marknative report.md --json

{
  "pages": [
    { "index": 1, "path": "/abs/path/report-01.png", "format": "png" },
    { "index": 2, "path": "/abs/path/report-02.png", "format": "png" }
  ]
}

Extract paths:

marknative report.md --json | jq -r '.pages[].path'
marknative report.md --json | jq -r '.pages[0].path'

Output path rules

• No --output: file placed next to input, or cwd when reading stdin
• --output with extension, single page: written to that exact path
• --output without extension or trailing /: directory mode — files named <stem>-01.png, <stem>-02.png, …
• SVG single-page + no --output: SVG written to stdout

Performance

First render per process is slower (~1–3 s) due to skia-canvas, MathJax, and Shiki cold-start.

Common patterns

# Quick preview
marknative doc.md -s 1 -o /tmp/preview.png

# Dark theme, single page
marknative slide.md -t dark --single-page -o slide.png

# High-res export
marknative doc.md -s 3 -o print/

# Custom JSON theme
marknative doc.md -t '{"colors":{"background":"#1e1e2e","text":"#cdd6f4"}}'

# SVG to PDF via pipe
marknative doc.md -f svg | rsvg-convert -o doc.pdf

# Render from stdin, JSON output
echo "# Title\n\nContent" | marknative --json -o /tmp/out/

Math support

LaTeX via MathJax — inline $E = mc^2$ and block $$\sum_{i=1}^n i$$ both work.

Programmatic API (Node.js / Bun)

import { renderMarkdown } from 'marknative'

const pages = await renderMarkdown(markdownString, {
  format: 'png',
  scale: 2,
  singlePage: false,
  theme: 'dark',
  codeHighlighting: { theme: 'github-dark' },
})
// pages: Array<{ format: 'png'|'svg', data: Buffer|string }>

Gotchas

• --output without extension → treated as directory, not a file
• Page numbers are zero-padded: page-01.png, not page-1.png
• SVG produces one file per page when --output is a directory
• Cold-start adds ~1–3 s to the very first render call per process