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views:

90

answers:

1
Q: 

Generate an image / thumbnail of a webpage using X/Gui-less linux

There exists numerous solutions on generating a thumbnail or an image preview of a webpage. Some of these solutions are webs-based like websnapshots, windows libraries such as PHP's imagegrabscreen (only works on windows), and KDE's wkhtml. Many more do exist.

However, I'm looking for a GUI-less solution. Something I can create an API around and link it to php or python.

I'm comfortable with python, php, C, and shell. This is a personal project, so I'm not interested in commercial applications as I'm aware of their existence.

Any ideas?

+1  A: 

You can run a web browser or web control within Xvfb, and use something like import to capture it.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams  2010-04-13 17:50:55
I never thought of using Xvfb; from my understanding it runs on memory. my server only has 512 mb ram. I wonder if i'll face any performance issues. Second, do you think i'll need to set up a queue for multiple requests?
dassouki  2010-04-13 17:55:02
I would set up a queue for it. Xvfb is not exactly a speed demon, and having multiple instances open could get hairy fast. I wouldn't worry too much about memory though; a 32-bit 1024x768 screen only needs about 3MB.
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams  2010-04-13 17:57:51
I'll keep this question open for now, hoping other solutions popup .. meanwhile, I'll try and implement xvfb
dassouki  2010-04-13 18:06:14

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