screenshots of whole web-pages

[Anon]

This is just slightly php-related, but I though someone here might be able to at least point me in the right direction.

What I need is to get a screenshot of a rendered web-page. In my project this web-page is dynamically generated, so doing this manually is no option. (Im going to scale the picture down, and use it as a preview, but there are a lot of uses for this).

As far as I know there are no php-functions for this (logical since this of cource is browser dependent).

My idea is to paste the url to Mozilla (the embedded version or just the Gecko engine), and grab the picture after it is rendered.

But this will be a fairly big task (and probably too difficult for me).. Since this is a general task (I can think of hundreds of uses for this) I was wondering if anybody has done this earlier...

[Anon]

Look into using gimp or other command like image utilitys in linux. I have seen full production image manipulation sites using gimp as the backend. Maybe there is some sort of command syntax for galeon or mozilla that allows you to dump the image straigh from the buffer... I imagine you are going to get into alot of raw code before you can get to the image itself.. maybe there is a way using the system() function top open a webbrowser as a secured user under an X session on the server, then using a command line tool grab the current screen buffer i.e. screencap it then close the web broswer..? also there is the possibility of hand doing the screen caps with some form of queing sytem..

-Jon