On 08/01/2011 05:12 PM, ashu.soman wrote:
How can one take a snapshot of a page or convert page into an image?
The way that Taha mentioned works by using a library that will download
the HTML and will try to render it to PDF. There are various such
libraries. Such renderers can't do magic, so the success depends on the
complexity of the popup web page (frames, divs, objects, flash?).
If that is good enough and the web page is simple, than you are OK.
But if it's a complex page, or you are building some cataloging site or
CMS which needs to store many bookmarks and grab snapshots for each
bookmark, and you are not in control of the remote web sites and their
complexity, than the only solution is to run a full browser in the
background, like a service, and make it do the snapshots to files.
On linux it is possible for example to run Firefox headless ( in the
background in a virtual XWindows - with the GUI sent to a virtual
screen frame buffer) and you can have it open any web page, render it in
the virtual buffer and then you can read the contents of the virtual
screen and convert it to an image file. And it will look exactly as if
you were on the desktop on that computer, surfing with Firefox.
The problem with this is that you need to have enough privileges on the
server to be able to setup the environment, and it will need lot of RAM
for each process (as much RAM as the browser itself needs to open and
more depending on the page complexity), and you will have to make custom
shell scripts on the server that will invoke the browser in the
background with the right options to save the output to a file.
Search on google: firefox headless
There are many guides how to do this, and here is just one random link
from the search:
http://www.unruhdesigns.com/blog/2010/10/using-firefox-on-a-headless-server-to-make-screenshots-aof-websites
Just a note, in case someone needs to do staff like this, in a similar
way you can even run Libreoffice on a headless X server, and for example
use it as a service to render DOC to PDF, or convert documents from one
type to another, execute macro-s on documents, etc...
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