Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

by rezaman • 15 years ago

11 12 15 years ago

Doesn't load external fonts from services like Google web fonts so it creates inaccurate screenshots for a lot of websites. An issue with QtWebkit, that is assuming this uses PhantomJS.

example (quicksand font not loaded): http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/ac

http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Quicksand

rezaman5• 15 years ago

Thanks. I'll put it on the list.

As for PhantomJS, I hadn't heard of it. I was originally rendering the screenshots with Selenium and the FirefoxDriver. They came out looking good, but performance was abysmal and when a page froze up I needed a mechanism to kill firefox manually.

Now I'm using Wordpress's Mshots service, but I'm looking at a couple of python tools to generate headless screenshots.

rezaman5• 15 years ago

I just got it working with PhantomJS and I must agree it does look a lot better. The problem with external fonts is still there so I'll have to crack open QtWebkit to see if we can't fix that.

rezaman5• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how useful is for everyone else, but I always thought grabbing a screenshot of a url could be improved.

TreesCanCode• 15 years ago

http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/8i

zacharycohn• 15 years ago

It failed when I tried to use it on www.timecube.com. That may have been a cruel first test, but I just wanted you to know.

Otherwise, this is great. I was JUST looking for a tool to do this on Friday.

rezaman5• 15 years ago

Yea, it's not quite polished just yet so you get the occasional failure to load a screenshot. I figured I'd gauge interest before dumping a bunch of time to clean up the edge cases.

Also, I just did timecube and it looks like it's working for me: http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/b1

jusob• 15 years ago

It seems to be a popular idea this week-end: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144066 (Browshot.com)

pplante• 15 years ago

Have you looked into using: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

I have used it on two projects in the past and found it very easy to use, but incredibly powerful. If you check it out, try out one of the more recent RC builds as they contain functionality the stable release does not.

chetan51• 15 years ago

What library are you using?

rezaman5• 15 years ago

To grab the screenshots I'm using PhantomJS. The webapp itself is running on the Play framework though.

lobster_johnson• 15 years ago

Renders fonts horrendously like I haven't seen in 5+ years. Is this produced on Linux with FreeType? Looks like you don't have TrueType hinting enabled.

My first attempt didn't produce anything the first two minutes I waited. I assume it timed out. You may want to look into providing some kind of feedback if the queue is long, for example, so that I can adjust my expectations accordingly. (Although realistically, I'd never bother to use something that didn't produce an image within 5 seconds.)

Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

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