

Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy - rezaman
http://instantscreenshot.com

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lobster_johnson
Renders fonts horrendously like I haven't seen in 5+ years. Is this produced
on Linux with FreeType? Looks like you don't have TrueType hinting enabled.

My first attempt didn't produce anything the first two minutes I waited. I
assume it timed out. You may want to look into providing some kind of feedback
if the queue is long, for example, so that I can adjust my expectations
accordingly. (Although realistically, I'd never bother to use something that
didn't produce an image within 5 seconds.)

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iamjustlooking
Doesn't load external fonts from services like Google web fonts so it creates
inaccurate screenshots for a lot of websites. An issue with QtWebkit, that is
assuming this uses PhantomJS.

example (quicksand font not loaded):
<http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/ac>

<http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Quicksand>

~~~
rezaman
Thanks. I'll put it on the list.

As for PhantomJS, I hadn't heard of it. I was originally rendering the
screenshots with Selenium and the FirefoxDriver. They came out looking good,
but performance was abysmal and when a page froze up I needed a mechanism to
kill firefox manually.

Now I'm using Wordpress's Mshots service, but I'm looking at a couple of
python tools to generate headless screenshots.

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pplante
Have you looked into using: <http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/>

I have used it on two projects in the past and found it very easy to use, but
incredibly powerful. If you check it out, try out one of the more recent RC
builds as they contain functionality the stable release does not.

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TreesCanCode
<http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/8i>

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zacharycohn
It failed when I tried to use it on www.timecube.com. That may have been a
cruel first test, but I just wanted you to know.

Otherwise, this is great. I was JUST looking for a tool to do this on Friday.

~~~
rezaman
Yea, it's not quite polished just yet so you get the occasional failure to
load a screenshot. I figured I'd gauge interest before dumping a bunch of time
to clean up the edge cases.

Also, I just did timecube and it looks like it's working for me:
<http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/b1>

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jusob
It seems to be a popular idea this week-end:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144066> (Browshot.com)

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rezaman
I'm not sure how useful is for everyone else, but I always thought grabbing a
screenshot of a url could be improved.

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chetan51
What library are you using?

~~~
rezaman
To grab the screenshots I'm using PhantomJS. The webapp itself is running on
the Play framework though.

