oh-my-pi/packages/snapcompact

@oh-my-pi/snapcompact

Bitmap-frame context compression for vision-capable LLMs.

Instead of asking an LLM to summarize discarded conversation history, snapcompact serializes it and renders the text into dense PNG frames of pixel-font glyphs that vision models read back directly. The whole pass is local and deterministic — no LLM call, no API key, no latency beyond rendering. Rasterization and PNG encoding happen in native code (@oh-my-pi/pi-natives).

Built for oh-my-pi's compaction pipeline, but the rendering API works on arbitrary text.

How it works

1. Discarded history is serialized to compact text (serializeConversation), with per-tool-result and per-argument character caps.
2. Text is normalized for the selected native font (normalize): ANSI sequences stripped, whitespace collapsed, newline runs folded into a single full-block glyph, box drawing and compatibility symbols folded to ASCII, semantic emoji folded to ASCII labels, decorative emoji dropped, and non-Latin glyphs preserved when either the selected font or the embedded Silver fallback can render them.
3. Pages of text are rasterized into PNG frames (render / renderMany). Frame width is fixed per shape; height hugs the rows actually printed, so a partially filled frame never bills blank pixel rows.
4. Frames persist in the compaction entry's preserveData and are re-attached to the summary message on every context rebuild.

Frame shapes are provider-aware, chosen by SQuAD recall evals (see research/) against real provider billing:

Reader	Default shape	Notes
Anthropic	11on16-bw	X.org 8x13 glyphs on an 11px advance; high-res Claude lines get 1932px frames
Google	8on22-bw @2048	X.org 8x13 glyphs on a 22px pitch; Gemini bills a fixed per-image budget, so larger frames are free chars
OpenAI	8on22-bw	X.org 8x13 glyphs on a 22px pitch, sent at detail: "original"
Unknown	Anthropic shape	Per-provider image-count budgets guard against gateways that silently drop frames

resolveShape({ api, id }) matches the model id, not just the wire API — a Claude routed through Vertex or OpenRouter keeps its Claude shape, priced for the gateway actually carrying the request.

Bitmap shapes keep their provider-tuned geometry and draw missing glyphs through the embedded Silver TrueType fallback one character at a time; East Asian (CJK/Kana/Hangul) glyphs render full-width across two cells so they stay legible in the narrow ASCII grid. Selecting silver16-bw uses Silver for the whole frame.

Install

bun add @oh-my-pi/snapcompact

Ships TypeScript source directly (no build step); requires Bun ≥ 1.3.14.

Usage

Render arbitrary text into LLM image blocks:

import { renderMany, frames, resolveShape } from "@oh-my-pi/snapcompact";

const images = renderMany(longText, { model }); // ImageContent[], first page first
const count = frames(longText, { model });      // frame count without rendering
const shape = resolveShape(model);              // eval-optimal Shape for the reader

Run a full compaction pass over prepared messages:

import { compact } from "@oh-my-pi/snapcompact";

const result = await compact(preparation, { model });
// result.summary        — short "resume prior conversation" lead-in, reading guide, and FILES section
// result.preserveData   — bounded archive source + rendered image middle

API surface

• Compaction: compact, CompactionPreparation, CompactionResult, getPreservedArchive, images, historyBlocks
• Rendering: render, renderMany, frames, geometry
• Shapes: SHAPES, SHAPE_VARIANTS, resolveShape, resolveShapeForText, idealShapeVariant, isShape, isShapeVariantName
• Text: serializeConversation, normalize, scanRenderability, renderabilityProbeText, dimStopwords, wrap
• Budgets: providerImageBudget, MAX_FRAMES_DEFAULT, FRAME_TOKEN_ESTIMATE, HQ_EDGE_FRAMES
• File ops: createFileOps, computeFileLists, upsertFileOperations

References

• Monorepo README
• Compaction architecture
• CHANGELOG