from Hacker News

Show HN: simple web utility for converting html to image

by kimura on 12/4/12, 7:12 AM with 16 comments

• by sdoering on 12/4/12, 8:18 AM

  Well, nice, really nice idea. Tried it and was frustrated by the poor quality, of the screenshot it produced. Grainy and blurred fonts, nothing I would wanna use.

  And the software had obvious problems parsing my css-styles. Some headlines were way of...

  Hope you might be able to fix these issues. If not, you are (at least in my case) not usable...

• by javan on 12/4/12, 1:22 PM

  I made a similar thing with phantomjs and node: http://node-urlshot.herokuapp.com/

• by jondot on 12/4/12, 1:05 PM

  Should be easy enough doing with phantom.js http://skookum.com/blog/dynamic-screenshots-on-the-server-wi...

• by lukeholder on 12/4/12, 7:56 AM

  This is nice, but I find webkit2png http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ (brew install webkit2png) a more simple and flexible way to quickly generate images (and thumbnails) of webpages.

  This is nice, that it hosts them for you immediately, although dropbox live links are pretty easy.

  Inception: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/103062/webkit2png.png

• by cabirum on 12/4/12, 8:38 AM

  pici.picidae.net - http://pici.picidae.net/CACHE/dec45eca572ebdea3a554c5827d33d...

  html2image - http://s3.amazonaws.com/amazon-cl2/LXOTY9N1IMC4BJ3GZU1PCZTNL...

• by MichaelApproved on 12/4/12, 1:12 PM

  Works well on the desktop but I couldn't get it to work on my iPhone and the UI was completely broken when I tried to load the page.

• by ppadron on 12/4/12, 12:28 PM

  If you need to host your own screenshot/html2png app, I've built this on top of PhantomJS: https://github.com/w3p/htmlshots. It uses PhantomJS's builtin webserver module to serve screenshots, so you don't need to spawn a new process for each screenshot request.

• by mahmoudhossam on 12/4/12, 10:05 AM

  I entered http://www.tumblr.com and it took around 5 seconds to come up with a result, this is because tumblr uses "endless scrolling".

  Is this by design?

• by skakri on 12/4/12, 12:41 PM

  As others mentioned - PhantomJS is way to go, it supports webfonts as well - http://www.grab.lv/_external/testpreview.png

• by balakk on 12/4/12, 12:06 PM

  Wow. At last, an azure-hosted site featured on HN front page.

• by eb0la on 12/4/12, 11:01 AM

  I've always done this kind of stuff with PhantomJS; but I find this much better (no need to copy and paste code for a quick 1-minute job).

• by Charlesmigli on 12/4/12, 8:09 AM

  Doesn't phantomjs do the thing for you?

• by jwuggles on 12/4/12, 10:04 AM

  haha i see waht you did there. this is the king of all craigslist posting - image based ads