I'm working with an application that needs to convert HTML documents into images on a server and then return them as GIFs to a client. We currently do this with Java and a package that lets you use AWT without a display. The problem is that its too slow and doesn't handle the newest HTML.
It seems like Gecko could be a better solution to the HTML rendering portion of the task. However, I couldn't see a way of rendering into an image buffer rather then a native OS window. It looks like (on Windows) we would need to pass in an HWND, or alternatively, reimplement the DrawingSurface code to write directly into a buffer. Is this correct? If so, how hard is it to replace the OS specific parts of the rendering engine and where can docs on it? (I'm assuming this would be equivalent to a port to a new windowing system). If not, can someone point me to a doc or set of interfaces on how do this? Yair Zadik Omniva Corp.
