Re: flexfax: html to Postscript.....

[Andreas Kostyrka <andreas@mtg.co.at>]

On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 09:22:20AM -0400, Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> On  8 May, Andreas Kostyrka wrote:
> > On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 06:15:37AM +0200, Peter Stamfest wrote:
> >> On Sun, 7 May 2000, Brendin Emslie wrote:
> >> 
> >> > Hi,
> >> > 
> >> > I have used html2ps and htmldoc to convert HTML to Postscript.  html2ps
> >> > works better thatn htmldoc but neither work as good as loading the page in
> >> > netscape and saving it as postscript.  Is it possible to save an html file
> >> > as a postscript file using netscape on the command line?  Can anyone suggest
> >> 
> >> http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/x-remote.php
> >> 
> >> But last time I checked, you needed to have netscape running in
> >> interactive mode. The -remote commandline switch wants to contact an
> >> already running netscape. 
> > Well, one could write a queue system, that would reuse one netscape instance.
> > Additionally the Framebuffer X server might be a nice idea.
> > One problem with this that I see is, that you cannot be sure when the page is
> > really loaded. (Perhaps I've overlooked something.) One way to monitor this
> > might be writing a monitoring proxy server, so you can monitor if netscape is
> > still activly loading something.
> 
> Hm..  Just  musing....
> 
> What about netscape running on a vnc server (X version of screen).  It
> just runs there, and you can feed netscape the -remote commands.  If
> you can "make" the html page you give the remote command to, you could
> include a javascript onload that could doe stuff (load a new page in a
> new window - whatever) to trigger the "completeness" of the page
> loading...
Well, right ;)
But VNC is overkill. The Framebuffer X Server would make more sense, as
it is designed for testing programs or things like this.
> 
> Netscape (at least navigator for Linux) does produce very nice
> postscript code.  It's even readable...
Well, but it produces in my experience rather poor Postscript :(
(Background color for example is ignored, etc.)
For b/w printers netscape might be ok, but since we replaced our printer
with a color one it's quite frustrating :(
(Netscape 6 has a much better output, but generates sometimes additional
 blank pages)

Andreas
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Andreas Kostyrka                     | andreas@mtg.co.at
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