5 ms·

Ohh, this is interesting. I'm just now looking for a solution to capture screenshots of websites, ideally from a previously crawled representation. From what I

by 9dev 2y ago

Ohh, this is interesting. I'm just now looking for a solution to capture screenshots of websites, ideally from a previously crawled representation. From what I can gather, all existing offerings just run a Chromium instance and request a screenshot from that, which is pretty expensive (both in operating and as a SaaS product). So, Blitz should be a pretty ideal fit for that, right? Can it run in headless mode and save a screenshot currently?

nicoburns 2y ago
It can't, but it'd probably only be a few hours work to add. We'd just need to plug the rendering library we're using into an image encoder rather than a windowing library. There might also be some extra work required to do tiling if you wanted a screenshot that is the full height of the HTML page (bigger than will fit in a single GPU texture), but I can't imagine that would be too hard.
- 9dev 2y ago
  That’d be an amazing extension with lots of potential to mix up the existing Screenshot aaS business. I’m no Rust dev, so I can’t help here, but I’ll follow the project closely!
  - nkozyra 2y ago
    Given general css support is not complete, would you really want a screenshot of something that might look radically different on a commonly used browser?
    - nicoburns 2y ago
      I guess perhaps such functionality will be more useful when the CSS support is more complete?
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    I added an example of rendering to image today. It's a bit rough atm (not very configurable), but it seems reasonably fast.
nwienert 2y ago
You can use Playwright with Webkit, which is much lighter weight than Chrome.
the_duke 2y ago
Many websites don't render properly anymore without Javascript. A pure "html + css renderer" would probably be of limited utility for screenshotting.
TimTheTinker 2y ago
You might also look into trying Prince XML. Its happy path is typesetting via HTML/CSS, but it may fit your use case as well.

by 9dev 2y ago

nicoburns 2y ago

It can't, but it'd probably only be a few hours work to add. We'd just need to plug the rendering library we're using into an image encoder rather than a windowing library. There might also be some extra work required to do tiling if you wanted a screenshot that is the full height of the HTML page (bigger than will fit in a single GPU texture), but I can't imagine that would be too hard.

9dev 2y ago
That’d be an amazing extension with lots of potential to mix up the existing Screenshot aaS business. I’m no Rust dev, so I can’t help here, but I’ll follow the project closely!
- nkozyra 2y ago
  Given general css support is not complete, would you really want a screenshot of something that might look radically different on a commonly used browser?
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    I guess perhaps such functionality will be more useful when the CSS support is more complete?
- nicoburns 2y ago
  I added an example of rendering to image today. It's a bit rough atm (not very configurable), but it seems reasonably fast.

nwienert 2y ago

You can use Playwright with Webkit, which is much lighter weight than Chrome.

the_duke 2y ago

Many websites don't render properly anymore without Javascript. A pure "html + css renderer" would probably be of limited utility for screenshotting.

TimTheTinker 2y ago

You might also look into trying Prince XML. Its happy path is typesetting via HTML/CSS, but it may fit your use case as well.