Some Web applications publish content that references other sites. In that case it is often useful to show a screenshot of such site pages.
This class provides a solution that can take a screenshot of any remote Web site page.
It starts an instance of the Internet Explorer browser and controls it in such way that it displays the page of the desired site. Then it uses a special PHP GD extension function to capture the image of the site page.
Despite it only works with PHP running on Windows, this is a very useful solution that addresses a frequently requested need of many PHP sites.
This class can be used to take screenshots of Web site pages using Internet Explorer.
It can command an instance of the Internet Explorer running on the same Windows machine to make it open a given Web page.
Several aspects of Internet Explorer can be controlled like whether its window will be visible and resizable, show the status, address bars and tool bars, and make the browser occupy the full screen.
The class can grab an image the whole desktop screen or just the Internet Explorer window.
The grabbed image can be saved to a given file in the PNG format (or GIF/JPEG if required).