render HTML (convert to bitmap)

Question

Can somebody recommend the best (and preferably portable) way to render HTML documents onto a bitmap? As far as I understand my main 2 options are WebKit and Gecko, but I wasn't able to find a good starting point on how to do it. When I last tried doing this 5 years ago, I ended up using Gecko to send the document to a printer, which is not really what I need. I need rendering to a in-memory bitmap.

To clarify: server side, no Java, no .NET, batch processing, performance, not interactive, no Javascript.

This feels like a very ignorant question, but you don't mean just a screen shot? — Smandoli, Apr 13 '10 at 18:55

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 13 '10 at 19:06

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You can do this from the command line using webkit2png.py, which uses Python and QtWebKit (though I haven't tried it myself yet).

answered Apr 13 '10 at 19:06

Justin Johnson

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this is probably very similar to cutycapt which is a Qt-based C++ program using WebKit. It's sort of good, except dragging all of Qt around for this is kind of sad. – MK. Apr 13 '10 at 19:15
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True, but at least its better than sending it to the printer ;) – Justin Johnson Apr 13 '10 at 20:12

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 13 '10 at 18:57

0

You can try the ScreenGrab plug-in for Firefox.

answered Apr 13 '10 at 18:57

Diodeus - James MacFarlane

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 18 '11 at 16:53

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The most promising solution I found so far is this http://sites.google.com/site/torisugari/commandlineprint2 extension for Firefox which adds a command line option for printing a file to a printer, PNG, PostScript or PDF file.

answered May 18 '11 at 16:53

MK.

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render HTML (convert to bitmap)

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