Automated web screen shots with Perl

John Wang — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:02:00 -0500

I've been looking for a program that will take full screen shots of web pages even when the web page is larger than the window size on my physical screen, requiring scrolling. This morning I found such a program in Petr Šmejkal's Win32::CaptureIE when it was mentioned by Displeaser on DevShed Forums in the "Screenshot of webpage" thread. It uses ImageMagick for image manipulation.

From reading the Win32::CaptureIE POD, the CapturePage function does exactly what I want:

CapturePage ( ) Captures whole page currently loaded in the Internet Explorer window. Only the page content will be captured - no window, no scrollbars. If the page is smaller than the window only the occupied part of the window will be captured. If the page is longer (scrollbars are active) the function will capture the whole page step by step by scrolling the window content (in all directions) and will return a complete image of the page.

After installing ImageMagick, Image::Magick and Win32::CaptureIE on my Windows / ActiveState Perl system, I generated this screen shot with the following short program using no additional processing:

#!perl
use strict; use warnings;
use Win32::CaptureIE;

StartIE( width => 900 );
Navigate( 'http://www.dev411.com/blog/' );

my $img = CapturePage();
$img->Write( 'capture.png' );
QuitIE;

Perl and CPAN continue to amaze me with their treasure trove of functionality. Are there similar tools for using Firefox, Linux, other image libraries or languages?

UPDATE: ishnid has found two programs with CLIs (posted to the same thread):

khtml2png on SourceForge. This is a command-line program that looks like it can be run without a browser. It uses libkhtml (used by Konqueror) and ImageMagick's convertn.
Pearl Crescent Page Saver, a commercial app but available in a free version. This is a Firefox extension and requires the browser.

UPDATE 2:: I recently tried Win32::CaptureIE with ImageMagick 6.3.0 and it doesn't work. Apparently there used to be a link to "PerlMagick" in older versions of ImageMagick that may not exist anymore. Unfortunately Win32::CaptureIE relies on PerlMagick.

UPDATE 3:: I just tried the free version of Pearl Crescent with Firefox 1.5.0.7 which it says it should support but I get a "Download error" with pageserverbasic-1.3.xpi.

Catalyst and image libraries

John Wang — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 23:05:00 -0500

I just migrated my Catalyst app to use GD instead of ImageMagick based on some reported compatibility issues.

Chris Laco reported Apache2/mod_perl2 would core dump with ImageMagick (on FreeBSD). He moved to FastCGI+ImageMagick first and is now using FastCGI+Imager. ImageMagick has been reported to work with Mason+Apache1.x+mod_perl1.3.
Andreas Marienborg reported on #catalyst IRC that Imager doesn't work with Catalyst+PAR and has moved to GD.
Someone on #rubyonrails IRC mentioned having problems with RMagick and was looking to migrate to ruby-gd

Wanting the best of all worlds, I moved to GD which also has a smaller memory footprint than ImageMagick. I ended up writing my own wrapper for Lincoln Stein's GD module using the Image::Magick API (drop-in replacement for a very limited set of functionality) though something like Image::Thumbnail, which provides a uniform interface to GD, ImageMagick and Imager, is probably better for general use.

Thanks to Chris and Andreas for their reporting issues. Hopefully I'll be all set with GD.

Dev411 Blog: Category imagemagick

Automated web screen shots with Perl

Catalyst and image libraries