This is really, really cool!
Skia is a incredible abstraction layer. The linked article at the top of the OP https://fathy.fr/html2svg (2022) has some great graphics of how Skia can support various backends including PDF rendering (via https://skia.org/docs/user/sample/pdf/).
It's also worth noting that the Chrome Graphics team is writing yet another Skia rasterization backend, just announced last month: https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-...
Given that this article came out a couple years ago, it's quite possible that it was seen by the Chrome team and inspired them to look at making a new backend from scratch!
Carbonyl is surprisingly performant and usable, especially with --zoom=300 --bitmap
At lower resolutions, it would be nice to render images using a "subpixel" terminal rendering library like chafa (https://hpjansson.org/chafa/), or maybe sixels/kitty image protocol.
I really wanted something that could just work...
Now that being said, the project was really cool.
So it might come slightly off topic but when I had last viewed the project, there were a lot of people asking if the project is dead or more importantly, what has happened to author and there were comments like this after the job part and even hackernews showed concern of the dev's life https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl/issues/201 [is the dev killed by IDF in Gaza #201]
No need to render to ASCII/Unicode anymore!
...but at that point X forwarding or VNC seems more useful.
"Forking xterm to render graphical applications"
brow.sh (firefox in the terminal) is still being updated though.
IcyWindows•5mo ago
LukeShu•5mo ago
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...