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

[Edward King <edk@cendatsys.com>]

What about the gekko engine from mozilla?  This is supposed to be the engine that renders
the html for the mozilla browser -- and designed to be usable independent of the
browser....

I haven't worked with it -- have to check mozilla for details...

- Ed King

Peter Stamfest wrote:

> On Mon, 8 May 2000, Andreas Kostyrka wrote:
>
> > 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)
> >
>
> This thread is quite absurd! I sure hope you are all joking (some are
> definitly).
>
> Using netscape to do something like this is plain wrong - it would be a
> VERY bad design, extremely fragile, heavy and in my experience the
> netscape mechanism isn't robust either (I once hacked a quick script to
> print out a collection of HTML pages - it did not work well).
>
> Just imagine what happens if you send your script a page that requires a
> brand new plug-in. Netscape will ask you if you want to download it - the
> script (probably) hangs or doesn't produce PosScript for the right page..
>
> I just mentioned the netscape URL for completeness, what it describes is
> useful for some applications, but not for scripting..
>
> I do think, however, that there should be a tool to produce postscript
> from HTML.
>
> The best way to do this would probably be to modify the rendering engine
> of some open sourcish browser to produce PostScript directly. Who knows,
> maybe the mozilla people would like to do this as a spin off (if the
> project isn't dead by now - even though they say Netscape 6 is based on
> it). A command-line-only netscape version should work. Try to tell this to
> the mozilla people, I'd say.
>
> Such a solution would have the advantage of being maintained as new
> techniques hit the web.
>
> But the same difficulties apply as mentioned earlier: what to do about
> that strange plug-in?
>
> The conclusio probably is: HTML is only to be viewed/printed/faxed
> interactively [at least for now].
>
> Sorry, I sure don't like this.
>
> --
> peter
>
> PS: I keep saying that faxing information is to destroy the information by
> converting it to pixels. One could apply the same thought to (modern)
> HTML: Converting a document to HTML actually destoys it - as stupid as it
> is, sharing information only across the web makes it completly
> unaccessible for anything but a presumably intelligent lifeform that scans
> it via optical nerves.
>
> PPS: Isn't this way off-topic?