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Life & fun · July 3, 2026

I built a declarative layout engine for SVG, Canvas, WebGL

Hey HN, I built a tiny zero DOM layout engine for vector graphics and custom renderers to resolves nested rows/cols/grids into exact `{x, y, w, h}` boxes, with text measurement, overflow signals, and collision separation. This is to help make SVG, PDF, Canvas responsive. Feedback welcome from anyone building canvas/SVG diagrams, dashboards, node editors, or diagram tools.

I built a declarative layout engine for SVG, Canvas, WebGL launched on July 3, 2026 with 5 votes, #4,557 of 24,623 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 19% of July 2026

What it does

A Declarative Box-Split and Collision Engine for Vector Graphics. It provides a CSS-like layout grammar (padding, gap, cols, rows, auto-height), but outputs a clean JSON coordinate tree that any visual canvas (SVG, <canvas>, WebGL) can use to draw pixels, connectors, and particles. - carnworkstudios/boxwood

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