Render HTML?

[William Park]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 12:28:38AM -0700, Terry Hancock wrote:
> I have a need to render some HTML to an image format
> for a project I'm working on. I've tried html2ps combined
> with ImageMagick, and it might be good enough, but
> I do have some complaints:
> 
>  * html2ps is in Perl, which introduces a new language
>    dependency (of course just about any web server will
>    probably have Perl anyway).
> 
>  * It chokes on a lot of modern web pages, especially
>    those with frames or javascript.
> 
> It appears that one might be able to use Gecko (the
> rendering engine from Mozilla), but it's not clear to
> me how much work would be involved in interfacing it
> to my Python-based program, or whether any of this
> work has already been done.
> 
> I can run html2ps using os.system() or popen() calls --
> a similar interface, or better yet, a Python API,
> would be nice.
> 
> It's not too critical an application, so I might just
> stick to html2ps, if it's too hard to do something
> else. But it only works about 80% of the time, and
> sometimes it actually hangs (memory problems?).
> 
> Any ideas, pet projects, etc?
> Cheers,
> Terry

If what Netscape displays is good enough, you can save it to PS directly.
    netscape &
    netscape -remote "openURL(http://www.babes.com) -remote "saveAs(babes.ps, Postscript)"

You still need to crop it using ImageMagick or something.

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8-CPU Cluster, Hosting, NAS, Linux, LaTeX, python, vim, mutt, tin