plate

One command for the image, print and render jobs a project keeps redoing: lift a subject out of a photo, enlarge artwork, make a macOS app icon, render HTML to PNG or PDF, put a flyer two-up on a sheet for printing, cut a screen recording into a looping demo. Each operation wraps an engine at a pinned version and is measured against committed test images, so the same input gives the same output next year.

_{Photo: Musicaline, CC BY-SA 4.0; the cutout is shared under the same licence. Regenerate with docs/screenshots/cutout.html.}

Install

go install github.com/lockyc/plate@latest
plate doctor --install

plate doctor --install downloads the engine plate manages itself (chrome-headless-shell, for every command that renders a page), checks every other engine against its pin, and prints the install command for any that is missing or too old, naming the commands that won't run until it's fixed.

uv is the only Python tool to install. The ML commands (cutout, inpaint, upscale, grade fit) run through it; the first run of each downloads its dependencies and model weights — several GB on Linux, where PyTorch ships with CUDA — into those tools' own caches. They run on the GPU when PyTorch finds one; PLATE_DEVICE=cpu (or mps, cuda) chooses the device.

Usage

plate cutout portrait.jpg subject.png                        # the subject, alpha behind it
plate render --pdf flyer.pdf --png flyer.png --size 792x1120 flyer.html
plate impose -o flyer-2up-a4.pdf flyer.pdf                   # A5 flyer, two-up on A4
plate icon --icns AppIcon.icns tile.svg                      # a macOS app icon
plate build site.manifest                                    # every target, skipping unchanged ones

plate <command> -h lists each flag with its default.

Commands

	Command	Does
Images	cutout	Lifts the subject out of an image as RGBA, down to hair and fur
	inpaint ⚠	Fills a masked region with LaMa
	infill ⚠	Fills a hole in a flat ground, matching the surrounding colour and grain
	upscale ⚠	Enlarges 4× with DAT, sharpening existing detail without inventing texture
	grade fit / grade apply	Recovers a reference image's colour grade as a lookup table, and applies it
	shrink	Resizes down to a small, sharp PNG or WebP, never enlarging
	icon	A macOS .icns and PNGs from a tile, placed in Apple's icon grid
	diff	Compares two images after lining them up, or two clips frame by frame
	qr	A QR code SVG any phone camera decodes
Render	render	HTML to PNG, JPEG, PDF or settled HTML with headless Chrome, skipped when nothing changed
	build	Renders every target in a manifest in parallel
	fonts	Embeds web fonts into a CSS file, optionally cut to one language's characters
	slides	Previews a Google Slides deck from its API JSON, one PNG per slide
Print & PDF	press	A print master: text as outlines, CMYK, brand colours exact, checked against a soft proof
	impose	An A5 flyer two-up on A4, cut down the middle, one- or two-sided
	marks	A print shop's copy: each page at its trim size with bleed and crop marks
	doc	Markdown or HTML to a plain A4 PDF with running heads and page numbers
	pdf info / text / pages / images	Look inside a PDF: metadata, text, pages as PNG, embedded images
Video	clip check / clip render	A screen recording and its event log into a short looping demo clip
	animate	A page's own animation captured frame by frame as MP4, WebM, WebP or GIF
Generate	generate ⚠ / generate accept	Rounds of attempts at a character pose from reference images through a hosted image model, each with provenance
	doctor	Checks every engine against its pin and installs the ones plate manages

Every command's usage line, and what it writes, refuses and caches: docs/commands.md. How plate is built: docs/design.md.

⚠ inpaint, infill, upscale and generate create pixels the source never had. A project that forbids this puts synthesis = "forbid" in a plate.toml, and they refuse to run. generate is the only command that needs an API key or spends money, and nothing in a build can reach it.

Limits

• macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon runs every command; clip and animate need ffmpeg at its pinned minimum.
• Linux (glibc 2.28+, x86_64 or arm64) runs every command except cutout --coarse vision, which needs Apple Vision; cutout uses --coarse birefnet there. On arm64, Chrome for Testing publishes no chrome-headless-shell, so supply one through PLATE_ENGINE_CHROME_HEADLESS_SHELL.
• Intel Macs: cutout and upscale refuse to run (PyTorch and ONNX Runtime publish no build for them); grade fit needs macOS 14 or later; inpaint is untested.
• render and animate run the page outside Chrome's sandbox with open network access: give them only pages you trust.

Status

In use, 0.x. What's next: docs/roadmap.md.

Development

git clone https://github.com/lockyc/plate && cd plate
just build    # ./plate
just test
just gate     # gofmt check + vet + tests
just quality  # the quality cases over quality/ (needs every engine and model)

The quality cases run plate over the openly licensed and synthetic images in quality/ and check each result against a measured threshold. Benchmarks, lockfiles and the release process: CLAUDE.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.