page thumbnail creator required

[dorayme]

Yes, Mac does not have a monopoly on innovation, Windows *and* Linux
have screenshot. It's PrnScrn key Alt+PrnScrn just gets you the active
window and hot the whole screen.

Doesn't sound like it has the infinitely adaptable one I mentioned,
where the user can control the exact bit of the screen wanted. The one
you mention is probably good enough for the OP. But, Jonathan, I know
you would just love the cropping snap facility in the Mac... but
please, I mean really please, do not go out and buy that Mac *you have
been hankering after* for years on this basis alone. Consider
carefully all other requirements. <g>

 

[Tim W]

On 16/10/2013 21:46, Denis McMahon wrote:
[...]

Dare I ask that you take a step back and explain what you expect to do
with these thumbnails?

My brief is that for the moment my new site should incorporate all the
content of the old site, but that it should be better organised and
easily navigable and should be arranged with a view to adding pages here
and there.

I am printing them out and cutting them out with scissors so that I and
my client can lay them out on a desk and group them together into
categories and discuss how you might move from one page to the next if
you are looking for information or wanting to download documents or
order the product or whatever.

Tim W

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Doesn't sound like it has the infinitely adaptable one I mentioned,
where the user can control the exact bit of the screen wanted. The one
you mention is probably good enough for the OP. But, Jonathan, I know
you would just love the cropping snap facility in the Mac... but
please, I mean really please, do not go out and buy that Mac *you have
been hankering after* for years on this basis alone. Consider
carefully all other requirements. <g>

I am tiring of Windows. Windows 7 has been less stable than XP with more
restriction. If I am chaffing at MS's shift from computer to appliance I
am certainly not going to find more "computer" with Apple. All my other
computers are running Ubuntu. This only is my only Winbox left and it is
solely because CorelDraw. Unfortunately they went with the MS-lockin
back about 6 years ago :-(

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

Doesn't sound like it has the infinitely adaptable one I mentioned,
where the user can control the exact bit of the screen wanted.

Infinitely adaptable? I think Apple have gone overboard with that
feature!

For the record, Gnome's screen capture has the option to select an area
as well, though it's less adaptable, being limited to whole numbers of
pixels.

<snip>

 

[dorayme]

Infinitely adaptable? I think Apple have gone overboard with that
feature!

Not really, it caters for non-humans like me who can split pixels, get
right in among them and do things in the subpixel world. Believe me,

For the record, Gnome's screen capture has the option to select an area
as well, though it's less adaptable, being limited to whole numbers of
pixels.

I'm quite sure there are such facilities in the non-Mac world. It is
just that this has always been built-in to many if not all the Mac
OS's I have had. Now I can't recall about OS 6 and 7!

 

[Ben C]

I don't follow. Why would the script be reading the page? What does it
do with that page source that can ensure that the page is rendered by
the time the input is exhausted? (I'm generalising, because there may
be no </html>).

The rendering hasn't necessarily finished by the time the browser has
seen </html> anyway. In many cases it will have only just started. And
then when it's finished, a whole lot of JavaScript will come along and
monkey around with things a good deal more.

I don't think there is any reliable way to say that a page has "loaded"
except just wait a bit. Some pages can go on changing for ever, it isn't
a well-defined idea. It's more of a social thing-- most people
designing a page will aim to have something presentable in a few seconds
and then stop annoying the user for a while.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I don't think there is any reliable way to say that a page has "loaded"
except just wait a bit.

What? Don’t you think it’s reliable to run your code only after the load
event has fired on the Window object? That is, put it in window.onload =
function () { ... }.

 

[Ben C]

What? Don’t you think it’s reliable to run your code only after the load
event has fired on the Window object? That is, put it in window.onload =
function () { ... }.

I think that's fine. I thought the OP wanted to grab a screenshot using
an external program after the page had loaded.

That means waiting for onload, and then for the JS that runs in the
onload handler, and then for it all to mostly settle down, which there's
no guarantee it will ever do beyond the convention that that's what most
users expect so what most authors do.

 

[dorayme]

I'd expect a tool for this job would be able to crawl the site and
generate the snapshots automatically. Unfortunately, I don't know of
any software like that.

Just a further note: I notice that in Safari on a Mac (and it might be
analogous on Windows), when you go to a webpage, a snap of the page is
put into a file whose path. on my Mac at least is
Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Reviews. In fact, a double
entry is made, one in jpeg format, another in png, the former half the
size of the latter.

So, need to snap each page, just visit it. The pics are all there to
be batch processed or simply used any way wanted. Mind you, they do
have long and obscure names like F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.jpeg
and F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.png.

In other words, might be worth it for OP to take a look at his
browsers and see what is cached and see if it can be used for his task.

Perhaps OP might simply write down on a piece of paper the navigation
structure he would implement, and a site diagram - without going into
every single detail for every page, with just the assurance to the
client that none of the information on present site will be lost. That
is what I would do, for what it is worth.

 

[Ben C]

Just a further note: I notice that in Safari on a Mac (and it might be
analogous on Windows), when you go to a webpage, a snap of the page is
put into a file whose path. on my Mac at least is
Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Reviews. In fact, a double
entry is made, one in jpeg format, another in png, the former half the
size of the latter.

So, need to snap each page, just visit it. The pics are all there to
be batch processed or simply used any way wanted. Mind you, they do
have long and obscure names like F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.jpeg
and F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.png.

Brilliant! It probably uses them to display those thumbnails of recently
or often visited pages that many browsers show you these days as a sort
of "home page".

 

[dorayme]

[...]

Just a further note: I notice that in Safari on a Mac (and it might be
analogous on Windows), when you go to a webpage, a snap of the page is
put into a file whose path, on my Mac at least, is
Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Reviews. In fact, a double
entry is made, one in jpeg format, another in png, the former half the
size of the latter.

So, no need to snap each page, just visit it. The pics are all there to
be batch processed or simply used any way wanted. Mind you, they do
have long and obscure names like F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.jpeg
and F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.png.

Brilliant! It probably uses them to display those thumbnails of recently
or often visited pages that many browsers show you these days as a sort
of "home page".

Yes, in Opera there is a page that comes up under a tab called Speed
Dial. In Safari, there is a facility under History menu called Top
Sites which displays such images, they also being links to the
original pages. You can thumb through all your visited pages by
scrolling horizontally.

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

Just a further note: I notice that in Safari on a Mac (and it might be
analogous on Windows), when you go to a webpage, a snap of the page is
put into a file whose path. on my Mac at least is
Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Reviews. In fact, a double
entry is made, one in jpeg format, another in png, the former half the
size of the latter.

So, need to snap each page, just visit it. The pics are all there to
be batch processed or simply used any way wanted. Mind you, they do
have long and obscure names like F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.jpeg
and F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.png.

That's handy. Particularly because, if they hang around for a while,
you can sort through them retrospectively to find what you need.

<snip>

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Brilliant! It probably uses them to display those thumbnails of recently
or often visited pages that many browsers show you these days as a sort
of "home page".

Yes, something Firefox now does when you open a new tab. I think Chrome
was the first to do it.

 

[Allodoxaphobia]

[...]

Just a further note: I notice that in Safari on a Mac (and it might be
analogous on Windows), when you go to a webpage, a snap of the page is
put into a file whose path, on my Mac at least, is
Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Reviews. In fact, a double
entry is made, one in jpeg format, another in png, the former half the
size of the latter.

So, no need to snap each page, just visit it. The pics are all there to
be batch processed or simply used any way wanted. Mind you, they do
have long and obscure names like F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.jpeg
and F491CA4ECDDD7092B7FE96FD65C0BD6C.png.

Brilliant! It probably uses them to display those thumbnails of recently
or often visited pages that many browsers show you these days as a sort
of "home page".

Yes, in Opera there is a page that comes up under a tab called Speed
Dial. In Safari, there is a facility under History menu called Top
Sites which displays such images, they also being links to the
original pages. You can thumb through all your visited pages by
scrolling horizontally.

As well -- with Opera -- you can use the "zoom control" (lower right of
the window) to shrink the web page to a thumbnail size and take a
screenshot of _that_. Just thinkin' around the edges of the box...

Jonesy