HTML to picture ( php parser for html2jpg / html2pic / html2img ) - php

I need to make thumbnails from html (and css) code. Similar to flash's AIR1 HTMLLoader.
Is there a php class or php script that does that?

If you have access to the command line from PHP (via exec() or shell_exec()) you can check out PhantomJS, a headless WebKit browser with a JavaScript API. I use this to do exactly what you're describing:
I generate an HTML file locally
I pass the path of that HTML file and an output path for the image (in my case a PNG) to a bash script that executes a call to PhantomJS (there are great examples when you download the package)
I serve up the generated image
I've tried a LOT of potential solutions and spent many hours on this problem and PhantomJS is by far the easiest I've found. There is a bit of lag waiting for the headless browser to start up, but from what I understand the latest version allows you to keep it running on a port of your choosing. I haven't been able to try this yet. You'll need GhostDriver for this as well. Check out the 1.8 Release Notes for more info.
Good luck!

Related

I want to write multiple images to an odt file either in python or php

I want to write multiple image files to a odt file. I will be specifying a dir and the script will take it from there thru a loop. But where do i start? I have never done anything like this before!
I found this python code, which can convert html 2 python... so we can parse an html first and then call this one. But there is no reference on how to use this.
html2odt code
Atlast I found a PHP way to write odt direct! Its well documented.
http://www.odtphp.com/
I have also written a complete practical solution in php. You can upload multiple images and get the odt document generated.
The code is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/images2odt/
The first post is done here.
For anyone wanting to use the Python code will need a Python interpreter version 2.6. It might also work with version 2.7. It's mainly used in Linux but there are Windows and Mac versions as well. You will also need the files listed in the from and import statements. These files are in some of the other folders. It looks like it is a part of a much bigger Linux package. One last thing, Python scripts usually takes their arguments from a command line.
Additional info:
I looked over the setup.py file and it told me that this is an API library for open documents called odfpy. The version is 0.9.2. The link it has for the documentation is broken. A google search for odfpy came up with a place to download a more recent version (0.9.4) in a tarbell here:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/odfpy
The documentation can be found here in an Open Office document:
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/odfpy/document/api-odfpyodt

Server-side conversion of raster images to vector images

I would like to convert images that have been uploaded by the user (in various formats and conditions) to a vector image format such as .eps. I'm primarily working in PHP.
What options exist?
There are a small number of autotracing software projects released under GPU (for example, POTRACE that you could run via system commands. I can't attest to their quality. Tracing almost always requires some element of human supervision to avoid things looking like a mess of broken pottery, but you won't know until you try. Rather than triggering the tracer via PHP, I would use PHP simply to save incoming images to a temporary folder and then, through cronjob (one- or two-per-minute), crank through the holding folder in batches (you could pace it that way and avoid it being used as a way to DoS your site).
I'm thinking of doing something slightly similar (though not graphic related) for an upcoming project, and I'm considering doing all my heavy lifting on a desktop machine, which would fetch all incoming files and process them before FTPing them back to the server. I'm somewhat nervous about having any complex resource-intensive script like this running on a web server.
Definitelly you can do this with the Inkscape
here is the list of formats it supports What formats can Inkscape import/export?
and it can be of course used with the command line or exec() command Can Inkscape be used from the command line?
Imagetracer is a free and open source (Public Domain) library and application which can be used on the server side. Disclaimer: I made these.
You can use ImageTracer.jar from
https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjava
like this with PHP:
<?php exec("java -jar ImageTracer.jar input.png outfilename output.svg"); ?>
You can also use the JavaScript version with Node.js on the server side, here's the example code:
https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjs/tree/master/nodecli
https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjs/blob/master/nodetest/nodetest.js
PHP is not an image editor. It is a hypertext preprocessor.
You have to move to serverfault.com, or even better on some image processing resource, and ask there for some command line utility that can be run from PHP using the system() command.

Download web page with images and stylesheets and (optionally) E-mailing it

I need to make snapshots of web pages programmatically using PHP and get them into a HTML E-Mail.
I tried wget --page-requisites. It downloads everything all right, but it doesn't change the HTML page's source code to point to the downloaded files rather than the on-line originals. Also, that HTML is of course a long way from being displayed properly in a HTML E-Mail.
I am interested to know whether there are ready-made solutions for this. I would already be happy with a solution that takes a HTML snapshot and changes the HTML accordingly. Being able to E-Mail it would be the icing on the cake.
I control the web pages being snapshot, so I have the possibility to adjust the content to optimize the results.
My server-side platform is PHP but with very liberal settings, I can execute things like wget and Perl scripts from within PHP. I do however not have root access and can not install additional packages or programs.
The task is to make a snapshot of a product page each time somebody places an order, so there is documentation about what the page looked like at the time.
wget has a -k (--convert-links) option, which will convert both links and references to embedded content (like images). See e.g. wget advanced use (also here).
For the email-part of your question - I'm sure you can use one of the existing libraries. For example, PHP has some PEAR package (do no remember the exact name) to handle HTML emails; I'm pretty sure both Perl and Python have something similar.
In this case, you try to do a website mirroring using wget. The simple solution is to use httrack which is a simple command-line tool. It's very powerful and configurable, try it!
The httrack website presents a GUI, but you don't need it, all is possible from the command-line (or from PHP).

Open Source PHP script for HTTP video streaming?

Open Source PHP script for HTTP video streaming?
I need some PHP script or script lib for enabling reading and writing from and to a HTTP stream. I want to write chunks of data...
Actually I'm looking for such thing because adobe Flash 10.1 now supports it... So it looks for me lots of such questions will appear soon)
BTW: I do not need some special server - I need a script that will be using PHP Streams
Introduced in php 4.3 so it will work on normal apache php hosting…
So… What do I need?
I need -
• Open Source Libs
• Tutorials
• Blog posts/Articles
would something like xmoov work for you? it appears to have some means to allow you to get intimate with the video-stream, but I've not used it first hand

Website screenshots

Is there any way of taking a screenshot of a website in PHP, then saving it to a file?
LAST EDIT: after 7 years I'm still getting upvotes for this answer, but I guess this one is now much more accurate.
Sure you can, but you'll need to render the page with something.
If you really want to only use php, I suggest you HTMLTOPS, which renders the page and outputs it in a ps file (ghostscript), then, convert it in a .jpg, .png, .pdf.. can be little slower with complex pages (and don't support all the CSS).
Else, you can use wkhtmltopdf to output a html page in pdf, jpg, whatever..
Accept CSS2.0, use the webkit (safari's wrapper) to render the page.. so should be fine.
You have to install it on your server, as well..
UPDATE Now, with new HTML5 and JS feature, is also possible to render the page into a canvas object using JavaScript. Here a nice library to do that: Html2Canvas and here is an implementation by the same author to get a feedback like G+.
Once you have rendered the dom into the canvas, you can then send to the server via ajax and save it as a jpg.
EDIT: You can use the imagemagick tool for transforming pdf to png. My version of wkhtmltopdf does not support images. E.g. convert html.pdf -append html.png.
EDIT: This small shell script gives a simple / but working usage example on linux with php5-cli and the tools mentioned above.
EDIT: i noticed now that the wkhtmltopdf team is working on another project: wkhtmltoimage, that gives you the jpg directly
Since PHP 5.2.2 it is possible, to capture a website with PHP solely!
imagegrabscreen — Captures the whole screen
<?php
$img = imagegrabscreen();
imagepng($img, 'screenshot.png');
?>
imagegrabwindow - Grabs a window or its client area using a windows handle (HWND property in COM instance)
<?php
$Browser = new COM('InternetExplorer.Application');
$Browserhandle = $Browser->HWND;
$Browser->Visible = true;
$Browser->Fullscreen = true;
$Browser->Navigate('http://www.stackoverflow.com');
while($Browser->Busy){
com_message_pump(4000);
}
$img = imagegrabwindow($Browserhandle, 0);
$Browser->Quit();
imagepng($img, 'screenshot.png');
?>
Edit: Note, these functions are available on Windows systems ONLY!
If you don't want to use any third party tools, I have come across to simple solution that is using Google Page Insight api.
Just need to call it's api with params screenshot=true.
https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v1/runPagespeed?
url=https://stackoverflow.com/&key={your_api_key}&screenshot=true
For mobile site view pass &strategy=mobile in params,
https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v1/runPagespeed?
url=http://stackoverflow.com/&key={your_api_key}&screenshot=true&strategy=mobile
DEMO.
You can use simple headless browser like PhantomJS to grab the page.
Also you can use PhantomJS with PHP.
Check out this little php script that do this. Take a look here https://github.com/microweber/screen
And here is the API- http://screen.microweber.com/shot.php?url=https://stackoverflow.com/questions/757675/website-screenshots-using-php
There is a lot of options and they all have their pros and cons. Here is list of options ordered by implementation difficulty.
Option 1: Use an API (the easiest)
ApiFlash (based on chrome)
EvoPDF (has an option for html)
Grabzit
...
Pros
Execute Javascript
Near perfect rendering
Fast when caching options are correctly used
Scale is handled by the APIs
Precise timing, viewport, ...
Most of the time they offer a free plan
Cons
Not free if you plan to use them a lot
Option 2: Use one of the many available libraries
dom-to-image
wkhtmltoimage (included in the wkhtmltopdf tool)
phpwkhtmltopdf
...
Pros
Conversion is quite fast most of the time
Cons
Bad rendering
Does not execute javascript
No support for recent web features (FlexBox, Advanced Selectors, Webfonts, Box Sizing, Media Queries, HTML5 tags...)
Sometimes not so easy to install
Complicated to scale
Option 3: Use PhantomJs and maybe a wrapper library
PhantomJs
php-phantomjs (php wrapper library for PhantomJs)
...
Pros
Execute Javascript
Quite fast
Cons
Bad rendering
PhantomJs has been deprecated and is not maintained anymore.
No support for recent web features (FlexBox, Advanced Selectors, Webfonts, Box Sizing, Media Queries, HTML5 tags...)
Complicated to scale
Not so easy to make it work if there is images to be loaded ...
Option 4: Use Chrome Headless and maybe a wrapper library
Chrome Headless
chrome-devtools-protocol
puphpeteer
...
Pros
Execute Javascript
Near perfect rendering
Cons
Not so easy to have exactly the wanted result regarding:
page load timing
proxy integration
auto scrolling
...
Complicated to scale
Quite slow and even slower if the html contains external links
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of ApiFlash. I did my best to provide an honest and useful answer.
Well, PhantomJS is a browser that can be easily put on a server and integrate it to php. You can find the code in WDudes. They have included lot more features like specifying the image size, cache, download as a file or display in img src etc.
<img src=”screenshot.php?url=google.com” />
URL Parameters
Width and Height: screenshot.php?url=google.com&w=1000&h=800
With cropping:
screenshot.php?url=google.com&w=1000&h=800&clipw=800&cliph=600
Disable cache and load fresh screesnhot:
screenshot.php?url=google.com&cache=0
To download the image: screenshot.php?url=google.com&download=true
You can see the tutorial here: Capture Screenshot of a Website using PHP without API
cutycapt saves webpages to most image formats(jpg,png..) download it from your synaptic, it works much better than wkhtmltopdf
I set up finally using microweber/screen as proposed by #boksiora.
Initially when trying the mentioned link here what I got:
Please download this script from here https://github.com/microweber/screen
I'm on Linux. So if you want to run it, you may adjust my step follow to your environment.
Here are the step I did on my shell on DOCUMENT_ROOT folder:
$ sudo wget https://github.com/microweber/screen/archive/master.zip
$ sudo unzip master.zip
$ sudo mv screen-master screen
$ sudo chmod +x screen/bin/phantomjs
$ sudo yum install fontconfig
$ sudo yum install freetype*
$ cd screen
$ sudo curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ sudo php composer.phar update
$ cd ..
$ sudo chown -R apache screen
$ sudo chgrp -R www screen
$ sudo service httpd restart
Point your browser to screen/demo/shot.php?url=google.com. When you see the screenshot, you are done. Discussion for more advance setting is available here and here.
There are many open source projects that can generate screenshots. For example PhantomJS, webkit2png etc
The big problem with these projects is that they are based on older browser technology and have problems rendering many sites, especially sites that use webfonts, flexbox, svg and various other additions to the HTML5 and CSS spec over the last couple of months/years.
I've tried a few of the third party services, and most are based on PhantomJS, meaning they also produce poor quality screenshots. The best third party service for generating website screenshots is urlbox.io. It is a paid service, although there is a free 7-day trial to test it out without committing to any paid plan.
Here is a link to the documentation, and below are simple steps to get it working in PHP with composer.
// 1 . Get the urlbox/screenshots composer package (on command line):
composer require urlbox/screenshots
// 2. Set up the composer package with Urlbox API credentials:
$urlbox = UrlboxRenderer::fromCredentials('API_KEY', 'API_SECRET');
// 3. Set your options (all options such as full page/full height screenshots, retina resolution, viewport dimensions, thumbnail width etc can be set here. See the docs for more.)
$options['url'] = 'example.com';
// 4. Generate the Urlbox url
$urlboxUrl = $urlbox->generateUrl($options);
// $urlboxUrl is now 'https://api.urlbox.io/v1/API_KEY/TOKEN/png?url=example.com'
// 5. Now stick it in an img tag, when the image is loaded in browser, the API call to urlbox will be triggered and a nice PNG screenshot will be generated!
<img src="$urlboxUrl" />
For e.g. here's a full height screenshot of this very page:
https://api.urlbox.io/v1/ca482d7e-9417-4569-90fe-80f7c5e1c781/8f1666d1f4195b1cb84ffa5f992ee18992a2b35e/png?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F757675%2Fwebsite-screenshots-using-php%2F43652083%2343652083&full_page=true
I'm on Windows so I was able to use the imagegrabwindow function after reading the tip on here from stephan. I added in cropping (to get rid of the Browser header, scroll bars, etc.) and resizing to get a final image. Here's my code. Hope that helps someone.
I used bluga. The api allows you to take 100 snapshots a month without paying, but sometimes it uses more than 1 credit for a single page. I just finished upgrading a drupal module, Bluga WebThumbs to drupal 7 which allows you to print a thumbnail in a template or input filter.
The main advantage to using this api is that it allows you to specify browser dimensions in case you use adaptive css, so I am using it to get renderings for the mobile and tablet layout as well as the regular one.
There are api clients for the following languages:
PHP,
Python,
Ruby,
Java,
.Net C#,
Perl
and Bash (the shell script looks like it requires perl)
It all depends on how you wish to take the screenshot.
You could do this via PHP, using a webservice to get the image for you
grabz.it has a webservice to do just this, here's an article showing a simple example of using the service.
http://www.phpbuilder.com/articles/news-reviews/miscellaneous/capture-screenshots-in-php-with-grabzit-120524022959.html
There are some ways in which you can achieve this in PHP, but realistically it's better to delegate this to a non-PHP based API which you can build yourself, or you can pay for. Many people have already listed screenshot APIs in the answers, and you can use any of those to achieve this. My own screenshot API is extremely well tested and covers many rendering cases that most APIs don't cover, but for most people, this is overkill, honestly.
My recommendation is to build your own API using Puppeteer, which is the canonical solution nowadays to build screenshot solutions. My service is built on top of Puppeteer and it really works well for most basic use cases.
You can build a serverless Puppeteer solution on AWS or GCP using something like https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrome-aws-lambda, which is an excellent serverless package for Puppeteer that comes pre-loaded with Chromium.
You can use https://grabz.it solution.
It's got a PHP API which is very flexible and can be called in different ways such as from a cronjob or a PHP web page.
In order to implement it you will need to first get an app key and secret and download the (free) SDK.
And an example for implementation. First of all initialization:
include("GrabzItClient.class.php");
// Create the GrabzItClient class
// Replace "APPLICATION KEY", "APPLICATION SECRET" with the values from your account!
$grabzIt = new GrabzItClient("Sign in to view your Application Key", "Sign in to view your Application Secret");
And screenshoting example:
// To take a image screenshot
$grabzIt->URLToImage("http://www.google.com");
// Or to take a PDF screenshot
$grabzIt->URLToPDF("http://www.google.com");
// Or to convert online videos into animated GIF's
$grabzIt->URLToAnimation("http://www.example.com/video.avi");
// Or to capture table(s)
$grabzIt->URLToTable("http://www.google.com");
Next is the saving.You can use one of the two save methods, Save if publicly accessible callback handle available and SaveTo if not. Check the documentation for details.
After a lot for surfing on web I found this.
PPTRAAS > A free tool to capture screenshot by passing your URL as a parameter
They provide multiple options by simply hitting their URL.
Get full page screenshot
https://pptraas.com/screenshot?url={YOU URL HERE}
Get page screenshot of specific size
https://pptraas.com/screenshot?url={YOU URL HERE}&size=400,400
One can even convert the page to pdf
https://pptraas.com/pdf?url={YOU URL HERE}
Not directly. Software such as Selenium have features like this and can be controlled by PHP but have other dependencys (such as running their java-based server on the computer with the browser you want to screenshot)
you can use cutycapt .
kwhtml is deprecated and show page like old browser.
I've found this to be the best and easiest tool around: ScreenShotMachine. It's a paid service, but you get 100 free screenshots and you can buy another 2,000 for (about) $20, so it's a pretty good deal. It has a very simple usage, you just use a URL, so I wrote this little script to save a file based on it:
<?php
$url = file_get_contents("http://api.screenshotmachine.com/?key={mykey}&url=https://stackoverflow.com&size=X");
$file = fopen("snapshots/stack.jpg", "w+");
fwrite($file, $url);
fclose($file);
die("saved file!");
?>
They have a very good documentation here, so you should definitely take a look.

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