Hi,
I'm thinking of trying to develop some software that will take screenshots of websites. I don't know any C(or C#), however I figured the easiest way to do this was to somehow plug into the graphics rendering of one (or more) of the internet browsers installed on people's computers. I think that they are written in C#, but I don't know how this would be done.
1) Is it simply a matter of calling a dll (or whatever the equivalents are on Linux etc) from within a window on the program, or if not a dll, some other file?
2) If 1 is true, then what is the name/location of this file for IE and Netscape on Windows?
3) Is it possible to call these functions, specifying a window 'size' without that window actually being visible (i.e. a theoretical window is created, and the webpage is rendered, but none of this can be seen on the screen)?
4) Assuming that it is possible to do the above, is it a fairly easy job to print that window to memory, then to create thumbnails of different sizes of it? I'm assuming that the same libraries (GD?) are used for this as they are in PHP and Perl, since they were exported to these interpreted languages.
Thanks for any responses.
I'm thinking of trying to develop some software that will take screenshots of websites. I don't know any C(or C#), however I figured the easiest way to do this was to somehow plug into the graphics rendering of one (or more) of the internet browsers installed on people's computers. I think that they are written in C#, but I don't know how this would be done.
1) Is it simply a matter of calling a dll (or whatever the equivalents are on Linux etc) from within a window on the program, or if not a dll, some other file?
2) If 1 is true, then what is the name/location of this file for IE and Netscape on Windows?
3) Is it possible to call these functions, specifying a window 'size' without that window actually being visible (i.e. a theoretical window is created, and the webpage is rendered, but none of this can be seen on the screen)?
4) Assuming that it is possible to do the above, is it a fairly easy job to print that window to memory, then to create thumbnails of different sizes of it? I'm assuming that the same libraries (GD?) are used for this as they are in PHP and Perl, since they were exported to these interpreted languages.
Thanks for any responses.