Converting HTML to image

Question

I have a web app that displays the profile of over 600 people, and each profile displays a word cloud. the word cloud is rendered using html.

The client has requested that the same word cloud to appear in an excel macro that pretty much does the same thing as the web app.

I have seen a few solutions that saves image from rendered page but is there a way to create images from the html programatically, without selecting each of the 600 profiles manually.

See this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/334532/render-html-as-an-image — sll, Oct 13 '11 at 14:17
Use selenium or WebClient in dotnet to iteratively select all your profiles and run the save image thing. — Dave Walker, Oct 17 '11 at 21:44

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 17 '11 at 21:29

Since rendering html is a browser's job, you could take a look at doing it by javascript.

Write a nice little program in jQuery (or your favorite js framework) that renders the word cloud of every profile on a canvas, and then use this:

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/canvas2image/

to take an image of the rendered html.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 22 '12 at 09:38

I know it has been a while since I asked this question but I'll answer it for the benefit of others. I ended up using something called IECapt to capture rendering of a web page into a BMP, JPEG or PNG image file;

http://iecapt.sourceforge.net/

I then wrote a unit test to iterate over the various urls, passing it as an argument to the IECapt utility. Was able to render over 600 images in a few seconds.

Converting HTML to image

2 Answers2