excalidraw-cli

Experimental Excalidraw CLI tool.

Parses Excalidraw JSON schemas (*.excalidraw) into PNGs (*.excalidraw.png).

This project is a follow-up to excalidraw#1261 and strives to provide a CLI for excalidraw.

Demo ⤴️

Install

npm install -g @tommywalkie/excalidraw-cli

Usage

$ excalidraw-cli --help
Parses Excalidraw JSON schemas into PNGs

USAGE
  $ excalidraw-cli [INPUT] [OUTPUT]

ARGUMENTS
  INPUT   [default: {cwd}] Excalidraw file path / directory path
  OUTPUT  [default: {cwd}] Output PNG file path / directory path

OPTIONS
  -h, --help     show CLI help
  -q, --quiet    disable console outputs
  -v, --version  show CLI version

How it works ?

excalidraw-cli uses node-canvas at its core, this allows to generate canvas without relying on the window context, and uses a home-made renderer which tries to mimic Excalidraw's as much as possible, using Rough.js API primarily.

Hopefully, excalidraw-cli will directly use Excalidraw renderer methods (like drawElementOnCanvas()) for consistent results, when they will be exported.

See the related issue thread excalidraw#1780.

Caveats

The currently used home-made renderer now supports any Excalidraw shape element but it's not perfect, there are still a few known issues :

Rotated objects can sometimes exceed canvas dimensions if too close of one side
Font ligatures are not supported yet

License

MIT

lucasavila00 / excalidraw-cli