[Sigia-l] Tool to automate generation of thumbnails of webpages?

[alfred at thunderstick.com]

For this app I intend to use Linux, so I was leaning toward Konqueror and
the dcop scripting language. I don't think it's terribly hard to automate,
just thought I'd roll over and play lazy :)

Turns out that all KDE applications can be remotely controlled with
something called dcop that lets you then script a lot of stuff in any
given app. I think once I find a decent reference for all the interfaces /
functions available I'll be able to churn this out. At this point I
understand how to tell the browser to load a URL, how to copy the current
page to the clipboard, and I can manually paste the clipboard into Kpaint
but cannot find a dcop command to 'paste image' or 'save clipboard as an
image to a file' so I can hand it off to Klipper, the builtin clipboard
app.

But anyway, this isn't a developers forum so I won't burden everyone with
the rest of the gory details :)

Alfred Werner

On Thu, 22 May 2003, Listera wrote:

> "alfred at thunderstick.com" wrote:
>
> > I have a need to generate many, possibly thousands, of thumbnails of
> > snapshots of homepages.
>
> I had the a similar need and couldn't find anything sophisticated enough for
> this so I built a dedicated application a few months back.
>
> It handles various user-settable parameters: Formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG, PICT),
> Picture scale, Capture delay, Frame border and include/exclude of cursor,
> browser address/favorites/status bars. It saves the pix into a database or
> file sytem, logs Window Title, URL, Date/Time stamp, as well as optional
> comments. It can export pix lists to text, clipboard , Excel or OmniOtliner.
> It can generate more than a thousand captures/hour on a cable connection.
>
> I never released it, mostly because it's really part of a larger proprietary
> app and I never had the time to factor out just these functions.
>
> You didn't mention what OS you're on. If it's OS X, there are some simple
> ways you can do this. One is the "screencapture" CLI method:
>
> It can be triggered from CLI (and thus also via AppleScript, Perl, etc.);
> it's found in /usr/sbin/
>
> screencapture          [-icmwsWx] [file] [cursor]
> -i capture screen interactively, by selection or window
>         control key - causes screen shot to go to clipboard
>         space key - toggle between mouse and window selection modes
>         escape key - cancels interactive screen shot
> -c force screen capture to go to the clipboard
> -m only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
> -w only allow window selection mode
> -s only allow mouse selection mode
> -W start interaction in window selection mode
> -x do not play sounds
>
> file   where to save the screen capture
>
> It's trivial to go to a URL via AppleScript and invoke screencapture, get
> the pix into clipboard (-c), and do a paste into an app than can resize it.
> If you know AppleScript, it'd be a fun project.
>
> Ziya
> Nullius in Verba
>
>
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