[ale] Thinking of html rendering

[Jay Loden]

I've done this before by converting html to pdf, using "html2ps" and "ps2pdf" chained together. The html2ps tools works great on the HTML, it's one major failing is that it doesn't support inline CSS styles, though if you're using external style sheets it should work just fine.

-Jay

Greg Freemyer wrote:
> All,
> 
> The other thread about HTML rendering reminded me that I need a CLI
> level mechanism to print (and/or convert to tiff) html files.
> 
> ie. This will be invoked via the "system()" call and I can't have any
> interactive requirements.
> 
> I do care a lot about the quality of the rendering and sad as it is,
> the closer to IE like it is the better.  ie. We do these conversions
> for our clients and most of them want to know what a page would look
> like from IE.
> 
> This is going to be integrated into a Windows platform, so I would
> need something that I can run under cygwin but that should not be a
> problem since I can always recompile the source.
> 
> FYI: We're currently trying to use the standard microsoft HTML
> rendering engine but on a small (but real) percentage of the html
> files it has a multi-minute delay to render/print a single page.  So
> when we hit these files our rendering rate drops from 10s of thousands
> per hour to hundreds per hour.