I have been looking into this over the last week and have come up blank as well. Doing this manually is simple, point your browser to your URL, and in windows use <alt><print Scrn> to copy an image of the rendering in the browser to the scratch-pad, then paste the image into a tool like paint to cut out the part of the image you want, and use the skew/stretch tool in paint to create the thumbnail (GD is a good solution as well) saving the file as a jpg image.
The difficulties with php is that opening the URL with fopen or using CURL allows getting the content of a page in html form, but provides no bitmap rendering of all that, let alone allowing JavaScript to alter the presentation as it would in a browser. What would be useful, if there were a way to open the URL in an IFRAME, and with JavaScript somehow capture a bitmap of the rendering of the web page, perhaps encoding the bitmap as mod64 characters and placing the result in a textarea for posting as input to a php script. This was the best solution that I could come up with but I don't have the skills to make this happen, yet. Question for anyone here, is does this sound like a path that might work? Can JavaScript access the rendered content of a webpage in window bitmap form? In my travels, someone had suggested coding something using mozilla and invoking it from a php script, but no one has done this yet that I can determine. Warren Vail -----Original Message----- From: Jason Davidson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 6:08 PM To: Michael Mao; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PHP] thumbnail of webpage First, im not sure how you would capture a snapshot of the page, sinse the page is rendered by the browser, and php is completely server side. Possibly there is a way to fopen a page or something, but... i dunno.. as for making thumbnail, using the gd extension, is quite easy. check the manual for GD. Jason "Michael Mao" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Is there a way to capture a snapshot of a html page and save it as a > jpg > using php? > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php