[webkit-help] headless port

[Derek B. Noonburg]

PhantomJS depends on Qt's rendering system to generate PDF.  There are
some quality issues with the PDF output (with some specific sorts of
HTML content that a client is using).  I believe I can do a better job
by directly targeting HTML-to-PDF conversion, rather than going through
Qt's QPainter API.

But that's certainly a fair question.  I'll do some comparisons when my
code is working.

(I accidentally emailed this response directly to David instead of the
mailing list -- sorry.)

- Derek


On 2013 Aug 30, David Tucker wrote:
> 
> Just out of curiosity, are you doing something that phantomjs doesn't?
> 
> dave
> 
> 
> On Aug 30, 2013, at 11:35 AM, Derek B. Noonburg wrote:
> 
>> I'm working on a custom WebKit port that converts HTML to a list of
>> drawing operations (essentially each GraphicsContext call generates an
>> entry on the list).  The ultimate goal is an HTML-to-PDF converter.  The
>> second part of the project will convert the list of drawing operations
>> to PDF.
>> 
>> This is all being done "headless", without any sort of GUI.
>> 
>> One problem I'm running into is the event loop.  Right now, my code
>> loads a URL (FrameLoader::load()), and then goes into a loop to handle
>> timer callbacks (which are set with
>> WebCore::setSharedTimerFireInterval()).  When loading is finished
>> (FrameLoaderClient::dispatchDidFinishLoad()), the event loop exits.
>> 
>> That works fine for basic stuff, but doesn't handle asynchronous
>> JavaScript (e.g., if JavaScript code is waiting on a timer, or for
>> WebSocket data, etc.) at all.
>> 
>> Is there a good way to handle this?
>> 
>> I have the possibility of adding some JavaScript code to emit some sort
>> of "finished" signal (as long as the code can still run in a regular
>> browser).  What would be the easiest way to pick up that signal from the
>> WebKit side?  I haven't really looked into the JSC code very much yet.
>> 
>> (If this post would be more appropriate on webkit-dev, please let me
>> know.)
>> 
>> - Derek
>> 
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>