Is it possible to render HTML directly as an image? I’ve been trying to do the following:

webView mainFrame] loadRequest:[[[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:myURL]]; NSView* tempView = [webView mainFrame] frameView] documentView]; [[NSData* imageData = [tempView dataWithPDFInsideRect:[tempView bounds]] [previewFrame setImage:[[[NSImage alloc] initWithData:imageData] autorelease]];

However, previewFrame stays empty. The peculiarity of this code is that webView is initialized with ‘WebView* webView = [[WebView alloc] init];’ and is never displayed in the GUI.

So, my question is, is there a way to get this method to work? Or is there a simpler way to directly render the HTML as an image without all this mucking about with views?

(The reason I want this to be not simply a WebView is that I want links to be disabled and the content to be scalable.)

Thanks.

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Read the WebView docs. You can customize virtually everything about webpages.

Related to your code, you may need to wrap dataWithPDFInsideRect: inside calls to lockFocus and unlockFocus on your tempView.

No, there is no need to lock or unlock focus here. The problem is that loadRequest: is asynchronous; you have to give it time to work. Send that, and set up a delegate to get notified when the load is complete. Once that gets called, then you can grab your PDF and go.

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I tried to get this to to work by setting up the delegate, but that didn’t seem to work. So, is there a way to simply render the HTML directly as an image? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

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Code, show us your code. :-)

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Here you go. But it’s probably better to use NSBitmapRep’s initWithFocusedViewRect: and generate an NSImage from that instead of a PDF. –KevinWojniak

#import <WebKit/WebView.h> #import <WebKit/WebFrame.h>

• (void)loadImage { // assumes webView is initalized somewhere already… [webView setFrameLoadDelegate:self]; webView mainFrame] loadRequest:[[[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@”http://www.apple.com/ipod”]]]; }

• (void)webView:(WebView *)sender didFinishLoadForFrame:(WebFrame *)frame { NSView *tempView = [sender mainFrame] frameView] documentView]; [[NSData *pdfData = [tempView dataWithPDFInsideRect:[tempView bounds]]; [pdfData writeToFile:[NSString stringWithFormat:@”%@/Desktop/test.pdf”, NSHomeDirectory()] atomically:YES]; }