I have been learning a bit of jQuery and .Net in VB. I have created a product customize tool of sorts that basically layers up divs and add's text, images etc on top of a tshirt.
I'm stuck on an important stage!
I need to be able to convert the content of the div that wraps all these divs of text and images to one flat image taking into account any CSS that has been applied to it also.
I have heard of things that I could use to screen capture the content of a browser on the server which could be possible for low res thumbs etc, but it sounds a little troublesome! and it would really be nice to create an image of high res.
I have also heard to converting the html to html5 canvas then writing that out... but looks too complicated for me to fathom and browser support is an issue.
Is this possible in .NET?
Perhaps something with javascript could be done?
Any help or guidance in the correct direction would be appreciated!
EDIT:
I'm thinking perhaps I could do with two solutions for this. Ideally I would end up with a normal res jpg/png etc for displaying on the website, But also a print ready high res file would be very desirable as well.
PostScript Printer - I have heard of it but I'm struggling to find a good resource to understand it for a beginner (especially with wiki black out). Perhaps I could create a html page from my div content and send it to print to a EPS file. Anyone know any good tutorials for this?
We did this... about 10 years ago. Interestingly, the tech available really hasn't changed too much.
ReplyDeleteupdate - Best Answer
Spreadshirt licenses their product: http://blog.spreadshirt.net/uk/2007/11/27/everyones-a-designer-free-designers-for-premium-partners/
Just license it. Don't do this yourself, unless you have real graphics manipulating and print production experience. I'd say in today's world you're looking at somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 hours of dev time to duplicate what they did... And that's if you have two top tier people working on it.
Short answer: you can't do it in html.
Slightly longer answer:
It doesn't work in part because you can't screen cap the client side and get the level of resolution needed for production type printing. Modern screen resolution is usually on the order of 100 ppi. For a decent print you really need something between 3 and 6 times that density. Otherwise you'll have lots of pixelation and it will generally look like crap when it comes out.
A different Answer:
Your best bet is to leverage something like SVG (scalable vector graphics) and provide a type of drawing surface to the browser. There are several ways of doing this using Flash (Spreadshirt.com uses this) or Silverlight (not recommended). We used flash and it was pretty good.
You might be able to get away with using HTML 5. Regardless, whatever path you pick is going to be complicated.
Once the user is happy with their drawing and wants to print it out, you create the final file and run a process to convert it to Postscript or whatever format your t-shirt provider needs. The converter (aka RIP software) is going to either take a long time to develop or cost a bunch of money... pick one. (helpful hint: buy it. Back then, we spent around $20k US and it was far cheaper than trying to develop).
Of course, this ignores issues such as color matching and calibration. This was actually our primary problem. Everyone's monitor is slightly different and what looks like red on one machine is pink on another.
And for a little background, we were doing customized wrapping paper. The user added text, selected images from our library or uploaded their own, and picked a pattern. Our prints came out on large-format HP Inkjet printers (36" and 60" wide). Ultimately we spent between $200k and $300k just on dev resources to make it happen... and it did, unfortunately, the price point we had to sell at was too high for the market.
If you can use some server-side tool, check phantomjs. This is a headless webkit browser (with no gui) which can take a page's screenshot, an uses a javascript api. It should do the trick.
ReplyDeleteSend the whole div with user generated content back to server using ajax call.
ReplyDeleteGenerate an HTML Document on server using 'HtmlTextWriter' class.
Then you can convert that HTML file using external tools like
(1) http://www.officeconvert.com/products_website_to_image.htm#easyhtmlsnapshot
(2) http://html-to-image.acasystems.com/faq-html-to-picture.htm
which are not free tools, but you can use them by creating new Process on server.