Converting HTML into an Image

Rails
1

I have this challenge of converting a bit of html into an image file
and then shrinking it into a thumbnail. The shrinking part shouldn’t
be too bad, but what advice can you give on converting the html to the
image? My thinking is that I will need to convert it to postscript or
latex and then convert it to an image from there. Is there an easier
/ better approach?

Michael

2

“converting html to an image” is a fairly complicated task. that’s why
browsers exist and are so complicated themselves.

Even a “good” html2ps util will probably only be a rough-estimate and
could
easily destroy the look of most websites. It just depends on if you mean
thumbnailing websites or some sort of html document that you have.

That being said, if getting the exact look right was not too important,
then
I’d use that method.

-hampton.

3

Thanks. Accuracy is not important since these will probably end up
being 50 x 50 or 100 x 100. We’re just looking for somewhat of a
visual representation. I just want to be sure before I dig in that
I’m not missing something a lot simpler.

Michael

4

I’m not sure how you could go about this, but you might be able to just
print screen it and crop it automatically. That might be simpler, but
I’m
not sure.

5

Thanks Matt, but this needs to be a function of the application. It
is snapshoting just a portion of the page and turning that into an
image and indexing them.

Michael

6

Hi

I think that this task is an hard one. The only nice solution I ever
read of is to use a browser library on the server to render the html
and take a snapshot of the rendered page.
Please note that this will grow the complexity of your server setup.

you can look at khtml2png html2png
www.hackdiary.com/archives/000055.html to have some inspiration.

Paolo

2006/5/25, Michael T. [email protected]:

7

Paolo N.
escribió:> Hi

I think that this task is an hard one. The only nice solution I ever
read of is to use a browser library on the server to render the html
and take a snapshot of the rendered page.
Please note that this will grow the complexity of your server setup.

you can look at khtml2png html2png
www.hackdiary.com/archives/000055.html to have some inspiration.

In Linux,

  1. Transform your html file to .pdf (OpenOffice does the task)
  2. Open with ImageMagick the .pdf file
  3. Save as .jpg, .png, etc.

Hope this helps,

Antonio

–

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pon mi dirección de correo en copia oculta (CCO), para evitar
que acabe en montones de sitios, eliminando mi privacidad,
favoreciendo la propagación de virus y la proliferación del SPAM. Gracias.

If you send me e-mail which has also been sent to several other people,
kindly mark my address as blind-carbon-copy (or BCC), to avoid its
distribution, which affects my privacy, increases the likelihood of
spreading viruses, and leads to more SPAM. Thanks.

8

If you’re on a Mac, you could use WebKit to render into an offscreen
view and just grab the view to an image…

9

If all the pages you want to get pictures of have the same format
layout/colours, you could take a screenshot of the layout, then grab
any dynamic text from the html (or straight from the db or whatever)
and overlay it in the right position. Depending on how much work you
want to do, you could customise it beyond plain text, too. As long as
you’re pages have a certain amount of consistency, you could do a
better job than any existing program/plug-in, because existing
programs wouldn’t take that consistency into account.
Hope this helps,
-N

10

Wow, thanks for all of the good ideas. I really appreciate it. I’ll
be digging into this this weekend and early next week so if I find a
workable solution, I might post something just so folks know how it
all turned out.

Michael

11

Jonathan del Strother wrote:

If you’re on a Mac, you could use WebKit to render into an offscreen
view and just grab the view to an image…

There’s an app that does just this:

Lets you pick the rendered window size, clip the page, all sorts of good
stuff.

12

On 26-May-06, at 11:14 AM, tom Shorebird wrote:

I have been getting all the email from your list. over 100
messages since earling this morning.
I don’t want to receive anymore
Thanks
Tom Shorebird

Maybe you shouldn’t have subscribed then? The link to unsubscribe is
on the bottom of EVERY one of those 100 messages.

http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
13

I have been getting all the email from your list. over 100 messages
since
earling this morning.
I don’t want to receive anymore
Thanks
Tom Shorebird

14

http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

15

$> man how-to-post

  1. enable brain
  2. type text
  3. submit
16

Pefect. Two excellent references. Thanks so much everyone. This
should save me some time.

Michael

17

You might be interested in looking at
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?Ruby%2FGtkMozEmbed

Sample : http://mirko.lilik.it/Ruby-GNOME2/moz-snapshooter.rb

Hope that helps.

Thanks,
Pratik

18

Thanks, unfortunately this needs to be function of the Rails
application. But I will look into the source for that. Thanks for
the tip.

Michael

19

Hi Michael,

Did you get this solved? Please email me at tmhaines at gmail dot com
if you did.

I’ve found one way - but it’s ugly and skips out of the Rails app.

Tim.

20

Michael T. wrote:

I have this challenge of converting a bit of html into an image file
and then shrinking it into a thumbnail. The shrinking part shouldn’t
be too bad, but what advice can you give on converting the html to the
image? My thinking is that I will need to convert it to postscript or
latex and then convert it to an image from there. Is there an easier
/ better approach?

a single argument to kdesktop will turn any url to an image. its part of
KDE…