Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Convert html to image with Html Snapshot Component

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

Do you ever want to take a screen shot of a web page in your desktop or web application? HTML Snapshot ActiveX is a software component that can make html to image easier than ever before. It can download and parse web sites and save a screenshot of the page in GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, WMF and EMF. You can choose to capture the entire page, or a thumbnail image of a specified size, and save it to a local folder.

The key benifits of using Html Snapshot are:

  • It is a flexiable componet to convert html (embeded flash movie support), mht, VML, SVG and text to image on the fly to file or in memory.
  • Convert html to image into various image formats like JPEG and TIFF etc. with custom saving options.
  • Html snapshot can be used in many programming or script languages to convert html to image, what’s more, it is easy to start using html snapshot with rich samples.
  • Html Snapshot has been used by thousands of enterprise customers since its first release in 2004. And it is being constantly improved by the company Guangming Software. Lot of new features and fixes are adding to the product.

    Here below lists the high light features of the component.

  • Directly save the web page at a given URL into image in bmp, jpeg, tiff, gif or png format. (i.e. html to image, html to jpg, html to image, html to tiff, html to png etc)
  • Directly convert html string to images.
  • Directly convert MHT web archive to image in bmp, jpeg, tiff, gif or png format
  • Support saving the whole html page to image without scrollbars.
  • Support http authentication and bypass authentication dialog automatically
  • Create thumbnail images from large images.
  • Get links, title, cookie or html source of a page
  • Get the html document DOM interface
  • Make gray or black and white images
  • Reduce color number in images while keeping better quality.
  • Support compressing images into jpg, tiff, gif or png in memory without temporary files created.
  • Support JPEG compression level and TIFF compression method selection
  • Convert vector graphics WMF, EMF, SVG and VML to bmp, jpg, jpeg, tiff, gif or png
  • Convert html to vector image format like EMF and WMF
  • Convert html to transparent GIF
  • Convert html to image with an existing webbrowser control
  • Automatically clip the image by removing white area in the html generated image
  • Examples in VC, Delphi, VB, VB.Net, C#, ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, Perl, Python, Cold Fusion, PowerBuilder, FoxPro, Windev, VB and Java script as well as Java and Ruby  are provided.
  • Support Windows Vista and IE7 now
  • Support Windows X64 edition (under x64 window)
  • Convert html to text
  • Draw watermark text on image after converting html to image
  • Html Snapshot is free to try. Just try it out for FREE in your applications to convert html to image before purchase.

    Related web links:

    Guangming Software: http://www.guangmingsoft.net
    Html Snapshot:  http://www.guangmingsoft.net/htmlsnapshot/help.htm
    Html Snapshot Download: http://www.guangmingsoft.net/htmlsnapshot/HtmlSnapSetup.exe

     

    Audio record component updated

    Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

    We released a new version of Audio record component.

    The major update is that we update some underline audio encoders. Feel free to upgrade or try

    Difference between html to image and htmlsnapshot

    Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

    html to image is an end user product for normal users.  It has a UI to batch convert a lot of URLs to image.

    htmlsnapshot is a component that aims to be used by developers.  It allows  maxinum flexiblity by providing a set of methods

    Deploy Audio record in web page

    Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

    Our audio record component can be used in web page via javascript or vbscript.

    This allows developers to build online recording application by recording the audio on clients’ computer and uploading the audio file to servers. See more http://www.guangmingsoft.net/wordpress/index.php/153/record-audio-and-upload/

    One question is how to deploy audio record to client’s computer. Audio record component is based on ActiveX. Tradional way is to make a CAB file so web browser can download and install it.

    But nowadays, ActiveX downloading and installing is not automatical way now as IE will always prompt dilaog for user to confirm installing those ActiveX files.

    So another choice is to build a setup package and ask your user to install it before doing record. Setup can be built with the free InnoSetup builder.

     

    A design for large scale URL or html to image system

    Saturday, January 27th, 2007

    Htmlsnapshot is a component to convert html or url to image. It can be used to build large scale URL to image conversion system. Here, the large means the system is designed to convert millions of URLs to image in the future.

    My recommendation for making a robust system is to use process based method.  There are a main process in the system. It maintains the list of URLs and launch child worker process to do the actual html to image conversion. Such worker process creates only one Snapshot object. It processes some URLs  (may be 1 or 10, can be predefined) and exit.

    The benefit:
    1. Each snapshot object will not affect each other. Htmlsnapshot itself is thread safe in general.  The underline webbrowser control is complex and might have concurrency issue in rare extreme condition. So this can avoid the unknown issue around threading.

    2. By wrapping snapshot function into a worker process, your main process will always have control to start/stop/terminate a worker process. Here your main process is a monitor and job dispatcher, it will be most robust. For example, it has the choice to stop the worker process when it is hung unexpectedly like downloading dialog pop up etc.
    Some may worry the performance comparing to the in-proc method. I would say for large scale conversion jobs, the robustness is more important. And the time to launch a process is a lot faster than downloading from internet.

    FAQ: Does AAR support simultaneous recording from different sources

    Thursday, January 4th, 2007

    Yes, our Audio Record Component  supports recording multiple sources on the same PC.

    Suppose you have more than one sound card installed, in order to record on the two cards simultaneously,

    1. Create multiple audio record object

    2. Set the correct device index and device line index.

    3. Start recording of all the objects

    Each record object can record its source perfectly

     

    Record audio and upload

    Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

    We add an upload method in audio record component.

    Suppose  you are a website owner, you want to record your user’s voice and save to your server. Now you can do this with audio record component.

    Your user can install the component on their machines, then they can record audio or speech, upload the audio. All these can be done in web browser.

    We have provided a demo application in the latest release of Audio Record Component.

     

    Active Audio Record Update

    Saturday, July 29th, 2006

    We just updated Active Audio Record. The features added are:

    1. Play the VOX file. You can use the play object to play the raw VOX file by specifying the sample rate and channels

    2. Add an event and method to record object to help advanced users to grap the content of the raw PCM wave data from sound card.

    3. Some bug fixes.

     

     

    Using Active Audio Record in flash

    Sunday, June 4th, 2006

    Flash movie has support for Action Script which is a kind of scripting language.

    But it doesn’t provide built-in audio record functionality for flash developers.

    Some developers uses Zinc which extends Action Script to include more powerful functions. One of them is the support for ActiveX control. (Note, not General ActiveX Automation). This makes it possible to use Active Audio Record in Flash.

    Since Active Audio Record is an ActiveX automation aerver, We have made an ActiveX Control Wrapper around it so that it can be used in Zinc. And we also provide a demo flash movie (Demo\Zinc) and its source FLA file.

    Please download and try audio record in flash now. :)
    If you want to redistribute a flash movie with audio record component now, the files needs to be redistributed are AudioCtrlWrapper.ocx, AudioCtl.dll and lame_enc.dll. And the first two needs to registered with regsvr32.exe like tools.

     

    Record audio with multiple sound cards

    Sunday, May 21st, 2006

    Our audio record object can support recording with multiple sound cards. You can do like this:

    1. Create multiple audio record objects at initialization time like this. (Take VB.Net as example)

    Public Class Form1
        Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form
        Private rec As AudioCtl.CAudioRecord
        Private rec1 As AudioCtl.CAudioRecord
     
    #Region ” Windows Form Designer generated code ”
        Public Sub New()
            MyBase.New()

            ‘This call is required by the Windows Form Designer.
            InitializeComponent()
            ‘Add any initialization after the InitializeComponent() call
            rec = New AudioCtl.CAudioRecord
            rec1 = New AudioCtl.CAudioRecord
            rec.SetSilenceLevel(1000)
        End Sub

     

    2. Then the record objects can be used independently by setting the device index to different sound cards. You can record different source line for different sound cards and save the audio in different output files.