Render HTML as an Image

Question

I\'m generating a coupon based on dynamic input and a cropped image, and I\'m displaying the coupon using ntml and css right now, the problem is, printing this has become an

Answer 1

There is a very powerful image creation library called GD which I often use with PHP.

I am led to believe there is a wrapper for this library that ASP programmers can use. Try this

Answer 2

I haven't tried to myself, but you should be able to render HTML into an image by using the WebBrowser control and the DrawToBitmap() method inherited from the base Control class.

UPDATE: I tried this myself and there are some caveats. The WebBrowser control doesn't seem to render the web page until the control is show, so the WebBrowser needs to be in a Form and the Form must be shown for the HTML to be rendered and the DocumentCompleted event to be raised.

Answer 3

What you can do is create an aspx page that changes the response type to be in the format you want and then put the image into the stream. I created a barcode generator that does a similar thing. Excluding all the formalities of generating the image, you'll Page_Load will look something like this:

Bitmap FinalBitmap = new Bitmap();
MemoryStream msStream = new MemoryStream();

strInputParameter == Request.Params("MagicParm").ToString()

// Magic code goes here to generate your bitmap image.
FinalBitmap.Save(msStream, ImageFormat.Png);

Response.Clear();
Response.ContentType = "image/png";

msStream.WriteTo(Response.OutputStream);

if ((FinalBitmap != null)) FinalBitmap.Dispose();

and that's it! Then all you have to do in your image is set the URL to be something like RenderImage.aspx?MagicParm=WooHoo or whatever you need. That way you can have it render whatever you want to specify.