render HTML (convert to bitmap)

Question

Can somebody recommend the best (and preferably portable) way to render HTML documents onto a bitmap? As far as I understand my main 2 options are WebKit and Gecko, but I wasn't able to find a good starting point on how to do it. When I last tried doing this 5 years ago, I ended up using Gecko to send the document to a printer, which is not really what I need. I need rendering to a in-memory bitmap.

To clarify: server side, no Java, no .NET, batch processing, performance, not interactive, no Javascript.

Answer 1

You can do this from the command line using webkit2png.py, which uses Python and QtWebKit (though I haven't tried it myself yet).

Answer 2

The most promising solution I found so far is this http://sites.google.com/site/torisugari/commandlineprint2 extension for Firefox which adds a command line option for printing a file to a printer, PNG, PostScript or PDF file.

Answer 3

You can try the ScreenGrab plug-in for Firefox.