Member Avatar for terrymold

Hi

I'm writing a website which will eventually create a new NewsLetter every week, which is saved in a MySQL Table. The user wants to view previous newsletters with the aim of selecting one to send out again. As each record contains 83 fields, this would be so cumbersome as to be unusable.

So, I thought it might be better to see if I could somehow create a thumbnail of each newsletter, as each one is just a single page, possibly as it was created, and display them for the user.

Does anyone know how I might accomplish this, or of any PHP script, or anything else? I have found a couple that require a DOS commandline to work.

Any assistance will be much appreciated.
Thanks
Terry

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Member Avatar for teedoff

cant you just capture a screen shot of the newletter, then copy it to Paint and crop it and save it to an image folder. Then all you need to do is resize to the size the fits, link it to the original newsletter page and thats it.

Member Avatar for Lsmjudoka

Above method would work, as long as you don't mind manually doing that. If you're looking for something automated, you could just select some important information from each newsletter? Perhaps date and title? I would imagine a thumbnail image would end up being a bit small to provide real information about selecting one.

Member Avatar for terrymold

Hi all

I suppose I should have mentioned that the user of this proposed website barely knows how to switch his PC on, let alone do anything even mildly complicated. So that is why I need to find something that will create these images automatically.

Incidentally, I have just found two PHP functions that might do the trick, but I haven't had time to evaluate them yet.

They are IMAGEGRABSCREEN and IMAGEGRABWINDOW.

Perhaps there are some readers of this forum who have tried these?

Thanks again
Terry

Member Avatar for teedoff

Ah I thought you wanted thumbnails for visiters to your site, much like google's image search. Where a user can view the thumbnails of previous archived newsletters, then select the one they wanted to read and click it, which would then take them to that particular newsletter page. I misread.

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