Web Page Screenshots with PHP?

Question

I know there is not a direct way to take a screen shot of a web page with PHP. What would be the most straightforward way to accomplish this? Are there any command line tool

Answer 1

html2ps does a decent job for relatively simple pages, and it requires very little in terms of external binaries, meaning it's very easy to install/use. If you control the pages you'll be capturing, then you can ensure that they'll render appropriately in html2ps. If you're hoping to capture arbitrary URLs, however, I'm not sure that the PHP port of HTML2PS is up to the task. It's also not the fastest thing in the world (expect render times in the seconds for complex pages), but that doesn't really matter for some applications.