Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by avivo 992 days ago
If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing. Then I can automatically take any website and have a cron job that dumps the result into a shared dropbox link where it can be used by the screen.
1 comments
konschubert 992 days ago
> If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing.

Yea, that's something I have been trying to build, but it's surprisingly non-trivial. There are a bunch of headless browser options, but I haven't found a good way to tell them: "Render the page in X width and Y height and then take a screenshot".

That seems like a problem that should have 100 open source solutions for it, and I am sure there are some that work really well! But I personally haven't found one yet.

link
ticoombs 992 days ago
> "Render the page in X width and Y height and then take a screenshot".

Isn't this the exact example of phantomjs?

``` page.viewportSize = { width: 600, height: 600 }; ```

At least that is what I use to do for screen testing for some of our low-hanging-fruit QA. At some point I rewrote it in puppeteer and it was as simple as the above line.

The screenshot results in being the X/Y size.

I'd be interested in why this doesn't work in your usecase.

link
simonbw 992 days ago
I made something almost exactly like this before. I needed to convert svgs to pngs and have them display the same way they looked in the browser. It turned out that spinning up chromium and taking a screenshot was the easiest thing way to do that. I think I used puppeteer.

Headless Chrome seems like it should be able to do what you want pretty easily. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/headless-chrome/

link
IanCal 992 days ago
It feels fairly reasonable imo to specify something like "this uses phantomjs with the following screen size" and just say peoples work has to fit that.
link
mlunar 992 days ago
Hi! A while ago I had exactly the same problem and thought process, so I made this: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/website-image-proxy

Hopefully you find it useful :)

link