I’m building a text editor application using NextJS and I want to show document previews that look like the actual content. Right now I’m just taking the first few words from each document but this doesn’t show any of the formatting like bold text or headers.
I need these previews to display in a grid layout where users can see what their documents look like before opening them. The previews should be small but still show the formatting and layout of the original document.
What’s the best approach to generate these formatted previews? Should I render the content in a smaller container or is there a better way to capture the document appearance?
I handled something similar by rendering the full document but capping the height with overflow: hidden and CSS scaling. Instead of chopping off text, I parse the rich content and drop it in a container that’s 200-300px wide with proportional scaling. The trick is keeping the entire DOM structure intact while just limiting what you can see. Throw in a fade gradient at the bottom so people know there’s more content below. This way you keep all your formatting - headers, bold text, layout - without the performance hit of creating separate preview files.
I’ve found creating a dedicated preview component works best for NextJS. Keep the original HTML structure but scale it down with CSS transforms inside a fixed-height container. This way you don’t lose any formatting. Just add pointer-events: none and control overflow so users can’t interact with the preview. Your previews stay consistent and actually useful while people edit their docs.
just use html-to-canvas - it captures everything exactly as rendered with all styling intact. cache the preview images so you don’t regenerate them constantly. much cleaner than wrestling with css transforms and scaling.