Question

I’m generating a coupon based on dynamic input and a cropped image, and I’m displaying the coupon using ntml and css right now, the problem is, printing this has become an issue because of how backgrounds disappear when printing and other problems, so I think the best solution would be to be able to generate an image based on the html, or set up some kind of template that takes in strings and an image, and generates an image using the image fed in as a background and puts the coupon information on top.

Is there anything that does this already?

This is for an ASP.NET 3.5 C# website!

Thanks in advance.

edit: It’d be great if the output could be based on the HTML input, as the coupon is designed by manipulating the DOM using jQuery and dragging stuff around, it all works fine, it’s just when it comes to the printing (to paper) it has z-indexing issues.

Answer 1

What you can do is create an aspx page that changes the response type to be in the format you want and then put the image into the stream. I created a barcode generator that does a similar thing. Excluding all the formalities of generating the image, you’ll Page_Load will look something like this:

Bitmap FinalBitmap = new Bitmap(); MemoryStream msStream = new MemoryStream();  strInputParameter == Request.Params('MagicParm').ToString()  // Magic code goes here to generate your bitmap image. FinalBitmap.Save(msStream, ImageFormat.Png);  Response.Clear(); Response.ContentType = 'image/png';  msStream.WriteTo(Response.OutputStream);  if ((FinalBitmap != null)) FinalBitmap.Dispose(); 

and that’s it! Then all you have to do in your image is set the URL to be something like RenderImage.aspx?MagicParm=WooHoo or whatever you need. That way you can have it render whatever you want to specify.