I need to take a .swf Flash file, ideally from a URL (but I can read the file from disk also) and create an image preview of it (png, gif or jpeg is fine).
I am using Adobe Coldfusion 8 so I'm looking for a Java solution. I need to get the first frame of the Flash movie only.
Many thanks in advance.
EDIT: I need to do this on the server in Java/CF at runtime - it's got to be automatic - I'm not looking for screen-grab software! :)
Is this running in a web browser? Or standalone - actually, either works. Simply get it to the point you want, and take a screenshot (Print Screen). That'll giev you an image you can paste into your image app of choice.
IF however you're wanting to code it, you'll need to probably want to try this freeware toolkit:
http://bytescout.com/swftoimage_swf_to_jpg.html
which allows you to take a flash file and convert the first frame to your image type of choice :)
Try swftools. It has utility called swfrender which can export frames into images. And it is open source :).
I'm not an expert but I think you can't without some tricky tools because SWF is a compiled flash program.
UPD: but there are some swf2flv converters, maybe u can use them. It is easier to make a preview from flv format.
UPD 2: I see several answers that recommends you to open it in a browser and make a print screen. If you really want to do this, look at JxBrowser.
AS3 has the capability to store the pixels that represent the entire screen into a BitmapData object, pass that to a JPG/PNG encoder, and post it to the server. There is a document on Adobe's devnet here that explains how the ActionScript works and what is needed with regard to PHP, shouldn't be hard to translate to CF.
here's an .net article:
http://www.codegod.de/WebAppCodeGod/screenshot-of-webpage-with-aspnet-AID398.aspx
basically you create a webpage showing the .swf flash file.
remember to call iecapt.exe including the command line argument --delay=10000 to give the ie activex control 10sec to load the .swf
Probably not what you're looking for but... Alt+Print Screen would work.. :)
More seriously.. find something that can render flash (IE ActiveX control?) and capture the buffer it renders.
Related
I want to make an functionality in which user can share the url of uploaded PDF. Now when the another user open the same pdf with given url, first person will scroll down and on another user can see the scrolled content directly or the pdf will be automatically scrolled.
Is it possible using Java, JavaScript or another technology?
Ex. Person 1 has shared exaple.pdf with person 2 by giving link of it.
Person 2 had clicked on link and the pdf is opened at his side.
Now person 1 is scrolling the pdf to page no. 3 and at the same time on the Person 2's screen the pdf will be auto scrolled to page no. 3.
Please let me know if my issue is still not clear.
If I were you I wouldn't definitely use PDF format because it's really hard to manipulate with. Instead of that, you could make your a document a HTML file and then listen to page events with JQuery (like scroll event). So far so good, this is the easy part.
Now you need to make clients communicate with each other so I think WebSocket is the best way for it. If you insist on Java, you can use brand new WebSocket API but it can be also implemented in pure JavaScript like Socket IO so you don't even have to use Java for it.
But if you have to work with PDFs, then good luck, it's going to be really tough task.
As Petr Mensik said it would be probably pretty hard to do it with PDF file with Java, JavaScript.
But if you really want I guess it would be appropriate to check some Adobe SDK. I'm not sure but maybe Adobe AIR or Flex or other Flash application.
I'm wondering if there is a way to create images out of text in a Java web app.
I'm using GWT to design a web app, and would like to allow some administration so that a small number of things could be edited by someone without a ton of savvy and not require a migration. This would be, say, menu headings, which I would otherwise create out of text in (e.g.) Photoshop, and include in my ear. Instead I want to allow an administrator to add some text, and I'd have some code to convert this to an image, using some specified formatting, for "nice" presentation.
As an example, the administrator might want to add a "news" page. So he will enter News and it will come out looking like:
Am I making sense? Is this something that is done? Are there libraries available for this?
This explains the concept pretty well.
Are you wanted to create Vector graphic then yes. You could also convert image into base64 string to store the image and reverse back loading at client.
I want to know how to convert html file to image. How do I do this?
You can checkout the source code for the popular BrowserShots service,
http://browsershots.org/
If you're running Windows, and have the GD library installed, you can use imagegrabwindow. I've never used it myself, but as always, the PHP site has lots of documentation and examples.
Use:
WKHTMLTOPDF.
It also has binding to PHP, or you can run it yourself from command line.
Problem is that you need to implement all the functionality of a browser and an HTTP stack (and this still does not deal with the case where the content is modified using javascript).
As John McCollum says, if you've got the website open in a browser on your PC, then you can use imagegrabwindow or snapsIE (MSIE only)
If you want to to be able to get a snapshot using code only, then you might want to look at one of the off the shelf solutions - AFAIK there are several programs (at least 2 of which are called html2pdf) which will generate a PDF of static html - and its relatively easy using standard tools to trim this to window size and convert to an image file.
e.g. https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/PDF-FromHTML/script/html2pdf.pl
So I'm not 100% sure if it's possible, but what I'd like to do is take a model that someone has created for a game, say in Blender or something similar, in various formats, and from that create an image to show on a website.
Are there any Java libraries around that could help me with that? Java3D maybe? Or even something in Flash? Ideally you'd be able to rotate the model in some embedded flash app, but I'd settle for a plain old image.
It depends on how far you want to go. Most models are going to be in a standard format- or can easily be converted to be - and most 3D Apis are able to load these formats in.
It would be a little unusual to do this on a server - you may even need to have OpenGL installed on it - but it should be quite easy to load a model in to a 3D environment and take a snapshot or a series of snapshots quite easily. Possibly even use these to create a short video clip of a complete turn around the model. If you're using Java take a look at some of the things people are working on over at http://www.javagaming.org/ - I don't know that Java3D is in use much still but there are other good 3D java environments around. JMonkeyEngine looked most interesting last time I was exploring that area.
Alternatively you probably can set up a way of loading the model into a clientside environment - I don't know if Flash can do 3D stuff now, but Shockwave certainly can ( although it's horrible to work with ) and I believe the Silverlight stuff likewise. Of course unless you are pregenerating your animations you are likely to be passing the model to your display logic on the client and a savvy user could intercept that, but the risk is probably reasonably low and from your question it's not clear whether that would be a problem to you.
Take a look into this post:
http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2010/01/25/introducing-asblender/
"Enter ASBlender, a library I slapped together in a few days to read Blender’s .blend file format and parse it to AS3."
lucky you! ;)
EDIT: added link for the project:
http://github.com/timknip/asblender
EDIT2: With the asblender library you can parse directly the .blend file (this is the working file, not a exported file format). Once you have the file inside the flash application you can use Papervision (I believe you do the same with other 3d libraries) to render the model, this way you can do a single image of the model or you can let user to see the model rotating. Beware that any of this libraries won't give the same render quality that a 3D application like blender is capable of. The good thing about this library is the capability of reading all the info in the scene, so you can match cameras and lights to be as close as possible to the original .blend file.
Alternatively there are also other parsers like Ase, Collada , DAE, KMZ, Max3DS, MD2, Sketchup, SketchupCollada... all of this inside papervision library.
I am trying to link some user docs to my Java Swing application. The user docs are pdf and I would like to be able to click on a button in my application which opens up some sort of pdf renderer to display my userdoc.pdf.
I do not want to use the runtime exec command
I have tried the following with not much success --
pdfRenderer -- this seems to not work for the current version of pdfs (seems to want older pdfs)
acrobat viewer -- I keep getting font errors (the document is displayed but everytime I go to a new page, I get an error)
JPedal pdfHelp - This sounds cool and if it will work, it would be the best for me. But for some reason, I am unable to open any file here. No pdf file that I have loads in the window (The pdfHelp panel comes up with a list of pdfs as promised, but when I right click one of them and say "OpenPDF", I just get a progress bar and the file does not load, I have tried a few files on this and checked file permissions)
JPedal SimpleViewer -- So far this one seems to be the most promising. I would like to remove some of the functionality of this viewer though and am not able to edit the xml to do this. When I edit the xml, then I seem to get xml parsing errors.
Has anybody done anything similar that worked? Help please
PS. I need this to work on Linux machines (IcePDF seems to works only for Windows). I would very much prefer something that is free!
Would Java's Desktop API meet your requirements? It does launch another process, but it's not through you calling Runtime.exec().
The Desktop API uses your host operating system's file associations to launch applications associated with specific file types.
Update: pdfHelp from IDR solutions (creators of JPedal) works now. The latest version (4.0) has fixed the bug and it reads my pdf files (and I am sure more of the latest pdf files). Just playing around with the product today and it is great! There are few minor bugs but I really appreciate how quickly Mark Stephens(?) responded to the first bug. Good work guys!
I chose pdfbox for a similar use case - it's not perfect with every PDF, but works pretty well and is under active development. From the PDDocument you can get a list of PDPage objects, which have a convertToImage() method that gives you a BufferedImage you can draw on screen. I switched to this from pdf-renderer because I felt it gave better results in general.
PdfHelp has moved to its own domain at http://www.pdfhelp.org and have been updated to fix your issues and add some other improvements...