Can I export part of an HTML page to an SVG image?

by

I’ve come across the same need and found the following free utilities which hold promise that this is possible:

  1. WebVector is an HTML to SVG or PNG convertor. It converts a HTML document into a vector image in SVG format or a bitmap image in PNG format. The Standard Vector Graphics (SVG) files can be further edited by a variety of vector graphics editors such as Inkscape.

    http://cssbox.sourceforge.net/webvector/

  2. CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to capture WebKit’s rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and bitmap formats, including SVG, PDF, PS, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP. See IECapt for a similar tool based on Internet Explorer.

    http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/

  3. wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPL) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the QT Webkit rendering engine. These run entirely “headless” and do not require a display or display service. There is also a C library, if you’re into that kind of thing.

    http://wkhtmltopdf.org/

—

Unanswered Questions: I know that you can use something like rasterize.js to render DOM objects into <canvas>, but how are these libraries built such that they are able to export SVG? Specifically, can WebKit itself be used to output “pixel-perfect” editable SVG of web content and HTML snippets? Is this a relatively simple task for a library or is this something significantly more complex?

Leave a Comment