I'm wondering if anybody has made a program to make a snapshot of a site. Looking at links on various XOOPS sites, I've seen alot of snapshots - but nobody explains how they made it.
Natualy I know how to grab the full screen or window and then edit it in some kind of paint program, but what I'm looking for is a program that will automate that task.

Daigoro:

There are, as you say, many ways to do this. What I do is simple:

1) I capture the screen using Alt + PrScr to copy the active window to the clipboard.

2) Open Fireworks and create a new file using Ctrl + N. Automatically it creates a canvas with the size of the image in the clipboard.

3) Paste the image using Ctrl + V.

4) Export the file using Ctrl + Shift + X

5) Select the tab "File" and there write the wanted width.

6) Press Export and write a filename.

That's it. Nothing fancy, just practical. If you want something else, visit a freeware or shareware repository and look for "screen capture". You'll find at least five or six good free programs.

Hope this is useful.

and how google.icq.com
done this stuff?

As usualy, you are right, if I search for a screen capture programs, then I will find many. But I'm looking for a browser-screen capture. One that will make a picture of the browserscreen as it's sopposed to look, and not how it's rendered in my specific screen resolusion. Also, it should be able to resize the picture.
Say I want to capture the main XOOPS site, then I would like to be able to specify that the captures file not exceed 150 pixels in width. The captureprogram should then grab the full screen in the width of the site (which appears to be something like 700 pixels), and the full height of the page (several thousand pixels). Then the picture should be scalled to 150pixels in width, and the same percentage in the height.
To do this manualy will be alot of work. Thats why I asked if anybody knew of a useable program.

It's been a while since I asked the original question...
but finaly I've found a very nice (windows) program that does exactly what I want. It's even freeware.

Check out url2bmp at Pixel Technology's homepage.

The program both has a GUI, and can be used from the commandline, too, making it easy to integrate into scripts.

(Site is even available in both english and french!)

Regards,

You might want to checkhttp://www.danvine.com/icapture/ andhttp://www.danvine.com/iecapture/. I've suggested to the author to start thinking about ways to prevent abuse, cuz it's great. I was wating for his OK to start a thread about his free service, but since you asked first there you have it

Wow, thats a usefull tool.
Thanks for your info.

It's pretty different from the tool I wrote about in my previous post.

I'm afraide hes setup will be compleatly swamped - it was pretty dificult to get propper answers when I tried it just now.

I'd wish W3C, Google or some hugs company with money to spare, would contact him and setup a better server for hes project.

Regards,
Daigoro

Hi,

like you all, I'm still looking for something useful, but there seems to be no better answer for UNIX/Linux than the script I used. Assentially, it opens a VNC server X session 800x600, opens the URL in Mozilla, takes a screen snapshot, and resizes the snapshot to 153x115 px. The X session is finally closed. Lots of sleep statements; snapshot takes two minutes, but you can take thousands over a day.

No guarantee, no support, no nothing. Just as it is. Known issue: It left jobs behind -- no idea why. So clean up later or debug. Insert echo statements to debug.

May be it helps.


-Karsten
======= web-capture.sh ==================================

outfile=`echo "$1" | sed 's#http://##' | sed 's#/#_#'`.jpg
if [ -e "$outfile" ]; then
echo "found: $outfile"
exit
fi
echo "creating: $outfile"
# exit;

date
echo "starting: $1"
vncserver :163 -depth 24 -alwaysshared -geometry 850x640
DISPLAY_SAVE=$DISPLAY
DISPLAY=:163
export DISPLAY
echo "sleep 25"
sleep 25
mozilla -P leo $1 &
echo "sleep 45"
sleep 45
xwd -silent -root -display :163 | xwdtopnm | pnmscale 0.18 | pnmconvol sharpen.cvl | ppmtojpeg > $outfile
# pnmcut -left 10 -right -10 -top 100 -bottom -30
vncserver -kill :163
DISPLAY=$DISPLAY_SAVE
export DISPLAY
echo "sleep 30"
sleep 30
date
echo "done: $1"

========== sharpen.cvl =======================
P2
3 3
18
8 8 8
8 26 8
8 8 8

Sievert, Looks nice, even if I can't test it on this Windows machine.

I'm sure I saw an extension for Mozilla on Linux that would do the same, but as I'm on a windows machine, it didn't matter for me at the time.

google.icq.com uses an application calle Giraffe or something like that, which creates screenshots of sites you can preview. It is a windows app, but there's no option to save the screenshots... ANd there is no (free) web version of this application.

Herko