Webthumb Rendering Engine Released
Webthumb uses a custom browser thats embeds the mozilla rendering engine to take its website screenshots.
We call that custom browser pageprint, and its svn repo is now available. The browser was originally written to generate PDF’s for Clearhealth so most of my recent development has centered around that. If anyone has tips on packaging or making the code work with newer embedding sources instead of mozilla 1.7.x i’d be most appreciative.
I know for certain the code won’t work with seamonkey 1.0.3
Its also pretty raw, but the binary in svn should work with centos and debian without any problems.
I’ve done it without any c/c++ and php and i’m using the newest mozilla with xvfb.
Xvfb :2 -screen 0 1024×768×24 -fbdir /tmp &
DISPLAY=:2.0 mozilla &
DISPLAY=:2.0 mozilla -remote “openURL(javascript:window.resizeTo(1024, 768);)”
DISPLAY=:2.0 mozilla -remote “openURL(http://www.example.com)”
sleep 5
xwd -display :2.0 -root -out image.xwd
xwdtopnm image.xwd > image.pnm
pnmscale -xysize 200 150 image.pnm > imagesmall.pnm
pnmtojpeg imagesmall.pnm > image.jpg
Joshua,
This is truly a cool tool. Do you have an API for it? If not, do you have plans for an API?
I can see in the blogging world how this would be useful but I’d like to write a script that I can just hand it a URL and possibly a description, have it use your code to gen a thumbnail and then automatically upload it to Flickr. (or in my case, the DevZone server.)
=C=
What’s the license for pageprint going to be? Didn’t notice one bundled in the svn repos.
Great, thanks Joshua!
I did a little play with webthumb:
http://epaulin.blogspot.com/2006/08/play-with-webthumb.html
Boris: an approach like that works, but has browser chrome and doesn’t have an easy way to detect broken loading. Plus it doesn’t handle the case i’ve done the development for which is unattended printing.
Cal:
There are plans for an api, im just not sure when i’ll get things done.
Mike:
GPL
Epaulin:
I’m glad you got it working, though i have binaries checked into svn so you shouldn’t have needed to compile at all.
Webthumb rendering engine released…
I first heard about Webthumb a few weeks ago and thought at the time what a brilliant tool it was. Since then I’ve been looking forward to playing with the rendering engine it uses. Thankfully it has now been released which I’m pleased about. Webt…
[...] WebThumb 关注ing. http://bluga.net/webthumb/ http://epaulin.blogspot.com/2006/08/play-with-webthumb.html http://blog.joshuaeichorn.com/archives/2006/08/21/webthumb-rendering-engine-released/ [...]
Hi!
Is there any way to install this thing on leased space . I have purchased some space and would like this to work there .
Is there any alternative ? could you please share it : what exactly i have to instruct my web hosting provider ?
(sorry to use ternary operator there )
kewl Tool Joshua
regards
Vivek
Vivek: your best bet is too used the soon to be released API. This isn’t the sort of code you’ll want to run if your not the only one on the server.
Great tool, thanks for your efforts!
I have adapted PagePrint succesfully to work with seamonkey 1.0.3. If you are interested in my changes, contact me
Hans Rakers, can you sen sources on my e-mail?
c0mat0z[at]gmail.com
regards, egor
I have recently sent the patches to Joshua through email but haven’t heard from him since.
You can find the patch on the url below, ofcourse with the usual disclaimers
works fine for me though (tested against seamonkey 1.0.3 and 1.0.5)
http://home.parse.nl/~hans/dev/pageprint/pageprint-seamonkey-patch.diff
Hans:
Thanks for the patches, getting them checked in is on my todo list. But i’ll be traveling again this week so im not sure when i’ll get it done.
I am a newbie of linux and when I tried with the boris code:
Xvfb :2 -screen 0 1024×768×24 -fbdir /tmp & &
I got an error:
_XSERVTransSocketINETCreateListener: …SocketCreateListener() failed
_XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: server already running
Fatal server error:
Cannot establish any listening sockets – Make sure an X server isn’t already running
What does that mean and what should I do to make it running?
Either you have an Xserver already running or you have something else listening on the Xvfb port (i’ve seen ssh pick ports in the X range before). Changing the screen # to something else will change the port.
I am curious about how did you know when mozilla has finished loading the page?
Baoeni:
I have a custom browser so I can capture an event when the network load is complete. But thats not perfect since there is still rendering time etc so i just wait for a couple seconds.
Hi
This is probably a total noob question, but after running
Xvfb :10 -screen 0 800x600x16 &
and then trying to run PagePrint, I get
Xvfb: client 1 rejected from local host
Xlib: connection to “:10.0″ refused by server
After some googling, I tried
xhost +
but that didn’t seem to help. I also tried running Xvfb on a different display (:6), and that was the same result.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Lost: Are you running Xvfb and pageprint as the same user, and do you have another xserver running on the machine.
Also what distro and X version are you running
I was running them as the same user, but didn’t realize that I couldn’t have another xserver running…
OK, now that I’ve changed inittab to run mode 3 and rebooted, I get past the “client 1 rejected” problem only to get another:
Document Load Started
Document Load Started
Document Load Stopped
Attempting to Print
Failed to get nsIWebBrowserPrintClosing Mozilla
I’m trying this on a box with FC5, if it makes a difference.
Thanks!
Lost: you could be able to work with another Xserver running but im not sure what you need to do to get the permissions worked out.
I haven’t run things on fc5, does that come with mozilla 1.7.8 or seamonkey 1.0.5
If I echo out the $mozDir variable in PagePrint, I get /usr/lib/mozilla-1.7.12, if that helps.
Lost: I’m using 1.7.13 and its working, though i haven’t tried the newest svn where i’ve only done builds with seamonkey
Thanks Joshua and good job
)
I’m playing with the latest version of svn and it works fine, except that the images captured are not ok. Check this to see the problem: http://antback.com/images/yahoo.jpg
Any idea about the cause?
Nomola: you need to make your XVFB screen larger, its at 800×600 and the mozilla window is at 1024×768
How do I actually check out that repository? The WebSVN instance browses just fine, but I don’t see a URL which can actually be plugged into subversion itself.
Charles:
http://svn.clear-health.net/svn/pageprint/trunk/
Josh, how do you execute pageprint from a php script? I can create thumbnails from the command line, but if I try to exec(./pageprint), my server gets in a endless loop forcing me to reboot.
dear joshua,
i would like to run your webthumb in my server,
but i always get segfault when running you binary build PagePrint-bin,
[root@molinux webthumb]# ./PagePrint –snapshot http://www.petitmerci.local petitmerci
string(115) “/var/www/html/widi/webthumb/PagePrint-bin -i PagePrint46b88fd9d0924 –snapshot http://www.petitmerci.local petitmerci 2>&1″
Url: http://www.petitmerci.local, Output: petitmerci
Starting PagePrint
Profile path is: /root/.PagePrint
Loading URL: http://www.petitmerci.local
Configuration:
minWidth: 640
maxWidth: 1024
minHeight: 480
maxHeight: 768
smallWidth: 80
smallHeight: 60
mediumWidth: 160
mediumHeight: 120
medium2Width: 320
medium2Height: 240
largeWidth: 640
largeHeight: 480
browserWidth: 1024
browserHeight: 768
outputFullSnap: 1
sh: line 1: 12127 Segmentation fault /var/www/html/widi/webthumb/PagePrint-bin -i PagePrint46b88fd9d0924 –snapshot http://www.petitmerci.local petitmerci 2>&1
the line number of segfault always change.
and for info, currently i’m using fc6 as testserver (where webthumb will put)
hope you can help to solve this
With new versions of firefox you have to set MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME or you get a segfault.
Hey Joshua,
I tried the link above to download from svn, but it didn’t work. Could you please let me know were I can download this from? Also, would pageprint work in a server environment with no gnome?
I really appreciate your efforts,
George
George: I don’t run that svn so there isn’t a lot i can do.
I believe that svn has been moved to http://svn.clear-health.net/svn/pageprint/
Also note i’m not longer maintainer that code (I’ve forked things locally) but i’ll answer questions if i can.
Environment wise you can runs things on a server but you need an minimal X environment installed (depending on how firefox/mozilla/seamonkey is built some gnome stuff too). You just match things up with Xvfb and you should be good.
Has anyone made an attempt to updated pageprint so that it uses the firefox rendering engine instead of seamonkey? I am in process of moving to a new server that has Centos 5 install and their are no RPMs available for seamonkey. Joshua I would imagine that your server/OS is at EOL and wanted to know if you were planning on tackling this issue?
I have a forked version of this code base (greatly refactored) that I use for webthumb. It runs on xulrunner and thats the route i recommend for anyone that wants to update things. But i’m not going to be releasing my fork since it doesn’t handling printing and I rather not put webthumb out of business.