Html Rendering in Winforms

[ramesh]

Hi all,

I am facing a problem with the rendering of html into a windows
application (C# .NET). I am trying with two possible approaches:

1. Use a control that directly renders the html into windows form, but
it should not be dependent on IE or mshtml. I didn't get such kind of
control so far. Can any one help on this?

2. Use a third party Html to Rtf converter and render the rtf in
windows .net RichTextBox. But this also creating problem while
rendering html tables. This is distorting the table structure and
complex formatting into table cell. Colspan and rowspan are not working
and many more... Again this problem is solved after we put RICHED20.DLL
in the application directory. But we can ship RICHED20.DLL along with
our product as its a microsoft dll comes with MS office package. What
could be possible solution for this?

Can any one please help me out to resolve this problem.

- Ramesh

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Ramesh,

I am curious, why do you not want it to be dependent on IE or MSHTML?
It's guaranteed to be on the machines that the framework is on.
--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]
- mv*@spam.guard.caspershouse.com

"ramesh" <ra*********@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:11*********************@g10g2000cwb.googlegro ups.com...

Hi all,

I am facing a problem with the rendering of html into a windows
application (C# .NET). I am trying with two possible approaches:

1. Use a control that directly renders the html into windows form, but
it should not be dependent on IE or mshtml. I didn't get such kind of
control so far. Can any one help on this?

2. Use a third party Html to Rtf converter and render the rtf in
windows .net RichTextBox. But this also creating problem while
rendering html tables. This is distorting the table structure and
complex formatting into table cell. Colspan and rowspan are not working
and many more... Again this problem is solved after we put RICHED20.DLL
in the application directory. But we can ship RICHED20.DLL along with
our product as its a microsoft dll comes with MS office package. What
could be possible solution for this?

Can any one please help me out to resolve this problem.

- Ramesh

[Tom Spink]

ramesh wrote:

Hi all,

I am facing a problem with the rendering of html into a windows
application (C# .NET). I am trying with two possible approaches:

1. Use a control that directly renders the html into windows form, but
it should not be dependent on IE or mshtml. I didn't get such kind of
control so far. Can any one help on this?

2. Use a third party Html to Rtf converter and render the rtf in
windows .net RichTextBox. But this also creating problem while
rendering html tables. This is distorting the table structure and
complex formatting into table cell. Colspan and rowspan are not working
and many more... Again this problem is solved after we put RICHED20.DLL
in the application directory. But we can ship RICHED20.DLL along with
our product as its a microsoft dll comes with MS office package. What
could be possible solution for this?

Can any one please help me out to resolve this problem.

- Ramesh

Hi Ramesh,

You'll be hard-pushed to find a *free* control to render HTML. Rendering
HTML is a non-trivial operation, if you think about it. There needs to be
an SGML parser, a document tree, the actual rendering routines... and
that's not even thinking about things like CSS, JavaScript and other
exciting bits and bobs.

However, citing from Wikipedia: "Gecko is the open source web browser layout
engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives". Since
you're coding in C#, you'll need to take a look at GeckoSharp, from the
Mono project: http://mono-project.com/GeckoSharp. I'm not sure if it's
what you want, or you can even get it to do what you want... but GPL rules
apply.

Hope this helps,
-- Tom Spink

[Joel Lucsy]

Tom Spink wrote:

You'll be hard-pushed to find a *free* control to render HTML. Rendering
HTML is a non-trivial operation, if you think about it. There needs to be
an SGML parser, a document tree, the actual rendering routines... and
that's not even thinking about things like CSS, JavaScript and other
exciting bits and bobs.

Well, I've wrapped HTMLayout
(http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/) at
http://earthsideterminal.com/htmlayout.net.

It supports CSS, but not JS at the moment. The author of HTMLayout does
have a version that has JS in it, but it doesn't have a full DOM. Just
depends on what you need, is all.

--
Joel Lucsy
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program."
-- Larry Niven