Re: Turning HTML into an Image

[stephen]

Since HTML is a formatting language, not a layout language, you won't get perfect results.

For basics, though, I'd recommend Image::Magick. It requires installation of ImageMagick (see www.imagemagick.org), ghostscript, and a whole bunch of other subsidiary programs, but you can transform HTML into pretty much any kind of image you want. Plus, you'll find it handy in resizing those images.

You might also want to check out HTML::FormatPS.

stephen

[mdog]

Yeah...I have ImageMagick but can't find anything in the docs with what I want to do...If you have a quick sample, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks!

PS. Did find an external program that will turn HTML to PDF (close but not what I want -- although maybe I can go HTML --> PDF --> JPG -- but I'd rather fly direct than have lay overs):
http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/

[beebware]

Ah, sounds like you've found the HTML to HTML2PS to GhostScript to JPEG method that I used before I discovered ImageMagick (which still needs HTML2PS to convert HTML files).

First I would download and then (if you really wanted to keep as much of the code in Perl as possible, download PerlMagick: but be warned, I know on Windows machines it can take quite a bit of tweaking to get working). Then install HTML2PS.

Once you've got ImageMagick+HTML2PS setup, I would call the convert function with the command convert myinputfile.html myoutputfile.jpg. The reason I used ImageMagick for the project I worked on was because I needed to make thumbnail images on the fly for a large number of different image types.