Thursday, May 27, 2004


khtml2png-like functionality using Webkit on OS X?


Lazyweb, I invoke thee. khtml2png is a clever little utility that uses the KHTML engine to render a snapshot of a webpage into small thumbnail image. I realize that I could probably get it to compile on OS X with a little sweat equity, but it’s got some fairly heavyweight dependencies and, theoretically, everything that one would need to do something similar on an OS X system is already there— between Webkit and Quartz, I don’t think there would be much standing in the way of a native implementation.

Am I right? Has someone already done this?


:: Dave Walker 12:13 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags:

:: Comments (6)

Comments:

Robert Sayre wrote:

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Response:
I'm sure it can be done with just Cocoa.

Several WebKit classes subclass NSView, which has dataWithPDFInsideRect: and dataWithEPSInsideRect:. From there it would probably be some [NSImage initWithData] stuff.
pallih wrote:

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Don´t know if you´re right and don´t know if it´s been done but i know it would be cool.
ssp wrote:

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In a low-tech approach you could write an AppleScript that converts a PDF file to a PNG file using that new image scripting stuff.

Then you can set it up to be a PDF Workflow service and - sneaky ! - use UI scripting to invoke it from Safari (as Apple fails to provide a decent scripting interface for printing).

Nicholas Riley wrote:

Title: Quartz Python bindings

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This would be simple to do with the Quartz Python bindings; fax cover sheets in Panther are generated by a similar method.
paranoidfish.org/notes wrote:

Title: webkit2png

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Response:
A couple of days back I promised to release the code i used to generate the weblog snapshots. I've finally tidied it up a bit and removed a load of crufty debugging code...
ssp wrote:

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Have you seen this http://0x.se/paparazzi/ ? Might be what you're looking for. P.S. Your search field doesn't work.



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