Html2Image

This simple Java library converts plain HTML markup to image and provides client-side image-map using HTML <map> element.

What Can I Do With It: Use Cases

Programmatically compose images - Use case: You need to compose images from other images and texts.

Solution - Create a web page using plain HTML, CSS and image and use Html2Image to convert it to an image.

Improve your spam - Use case: You need to send decorative HTML email.

You craft your HTML using CSS, images and links.
Alas, your clients open their Outlook, Gmail or any other mail client mailbox, and find your mail all scrambled up (merely resembles the presentation of the same HTML in a browser).
That's because Outlook and other clients only support limited functionality of HTML and have different implementations and bugs.
Solution - Use Html2Image to convert your original mail's HTML to a new HTML containing only image (<img/>) and client-side image-map (<map/>) for the links in the original HTML.
This also allow you to easily use unique fonts in your mail.

Prevent spamming - Use case: Your website has a list of contacts and their email addresses.

The email addresses are in plain text, allowing robots and spiders to harvest these addresses and spam your team with Viagra ads.
Solution - Use Html2Image to convert those email addresses to images.

What Do I Give and What Do I Get

Html2Image allows you to transform this HTML markup:

<b>Hello World!</b> Please goto <a title="Goto Google" href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>.

To this visually equivalent HTML markup:

<map name="map">
<area href="http://www.google.com" coords="153,3,193,22" shape="rect" title="Goto Google">
</map>
<img border="0" usemap="#map" src="hello-world.png"/>

Supported Images Formats

Html2Image allows you to save your HTML as GIF, PNG or JPEG image.

API

Html2Image as only one useful Java class, HtmlImageGenerator.

Common usage is this:

HtmlImageGenerator imageGenerator = new HtmlImageGenerator();
imageGenerator.loadHtml("<b>Hello World!</b> Please goto <a title=\"Goto Google\" href=\"http://www.google.com\">Google</a>.");
imageGenerator.saveAsImage("hello-world.png");
imageGenerator.saveAsHtmlWithMap("hello-world.html", "hello-world.png");

Which will generate hello-world.png image of the HTML and hello-world.html file containing client-side image-map <map> (as in the example above).

HtmlImageGenerator Methods

loadUrl(url) - Loads HTML from URL object or URL string.
loadHtml(html) - Loads HTML source.

saveAsImage(file) - Save loaded HTML as image.
saveAsHtmlWithMap(file, imageUrl) - Creates an HTML file containing client-side image-map <map> generated from HTML's links.

getLinks() - List all links in the HTML document and their corresponding href, target, title, position and dimension.
getBufferedImage() - Get AWT buffered image of the HTML.
getLinksMapMarkup(mapName) - Get HTML snippet of the client-side image-map <map> generated from the links.

get/setOrientation(orientation) - Get/Set document orientation (left-to-right or right-to-left).
get/setSize(dimension) - Get/Set size of the generated image.

Download

You can download Html2Image from the download page or use it as Maven dependency:

<dependency>
   <groupId>gui.ava</groupId>
   <artifactId>html2image</artifactId>
   <version>0.9</version>
</dependency>

<repositories>
   <repository>
      <id>yoava</id>
      <name>AOL yoava</name>
      <url>http://yoava.artifactoryonline.com/yoava/repo</url>
   </repository>
</repositories>