Developer Spends 7 Months Building Open-Source Chess Diagram Export Tool

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A developer began building an open-source chess diagram tool in December 2025 after finding existing options either watermarked outputs, required accounts, or exported at low resolution. The tool allows users to input a FEN string and export board diagrams as high-resolution PNGs of up to 1200 DPI with configurable dimensions, no watermark, and no account required. After seven months, the project has 5 GitHub stars, 6 forks, and modest npm downloads, with around $13 spent on hosting. The developer recently extracted the rendering engine into a standalone package, @chessvision-org/chess-vision, designed to work across Node.js, Deno, Bun, and the browser with pure SVG output and zero dependencies. Despite the technical progress, the developer acknowledges that reaching the niche audience of chess composers remains a greater challenge than building the tool itself.

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