Geeky question

[babysimon]

Anyone ever been able to render HTML to a bitmap from the command line?

What I want to type is:

<hypothetical>
mozilla http://www.mysite.com/ -outputfile mysite.png -width 800 -height 600
</hypothetical>

Obviously Mozilla doesn't have this feature - anyone got any ideas?

Update:
I just accidentally wrote khtml2png. Currently incredibly unpolished but works. Will polish and release tomorrow, I suppose.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The only route I can think of involves enormous pain - use the xvfb server to run Mozilla under X, then screen grab the contents.

[babysimon]

I would only call that medium-sized pain, but yes. I was wondering if anyone had any better ideas though...

[hypermallard.livejournal.com]

How about

html2ps (http://www.tdb.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html) some.web.site | ps2png (http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/sh/ps2png)

or even

html2jpg (http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/html2jpg/)

And there's always the netpbm (http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/) utilities.

[babysimon]

I'm looking for something which uses a "real" HTML engine (which basically means Gecko or KHTML) as the sites in question tend to use a lot of HTML 4 and the look is important. Still, at least html2jpg looks like someone's already automated the screen-grab approach. Thanks.

[hypermallard.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, wasn't until after I went to sit down that I realised that the first one wasn't anything like what you wanted :-)