Re: [Boston.pm] HTML Renderer

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Gyepi SAM wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 12:06:26PM -0600, Alex Brelsfoard wrote:
> > You might also want to lookin into Image::Magick.  It does some pretty
> > impressive things and I could have sworn I read somehwere that it could do
> > just that.  I have used Image:Magick before and it's very fun and easy.  I
> > would definitely suggest looking into it.  I will too if I get some time
> > later.
> 
> Ah yes, a clue!
> 
> It turns out that there is an html to postscript converter
>   
>   http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

Is it aware of CSS and Javascript? The documentation --

  <http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2psug.html>

-- implies that it's aware of CSS (in fact, the config file syntax looks 
like it's just CSS), but I see no mention of Javascript, which can be at 
least as important in controlling what ends up on a page.

It may be attacking a small nut with an enormous hammer, but wouldn't 
the best approach to this be some kind of scriptable wrapper around the 
Gecko or KHTML rendering engine? That way you're starting out with the 
way the represented in a standard client side browser's engine.

Similarly -- and this way lies madness, I admit up front -- just run the 
script on a system that can use AppleScript or COM (or WSH or whatever 
it is, I'm not a Windows programmer) to just automate interacting with a 
regular browser like Firefox or Safari, and save the result that way. If 
you run it on OSX, you can go straight from this to a PDF file for free.


But this is way more overhead than html2ps; if you can live with the 
screen grab just being an approximation of what the user sees, rather 
than a perfect match, it's *much* easier than what I'm suggesting :-)
 
 

-- 
Chris Devers