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Capturing Scrolling Pages

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SuperMan:
I have an add-on for Firefox called qSnap.  It's the only thing I've found that reliably renders perfect image snapshots of full web pages (even if they scroll on your screen) without actually saving the page in some html related format.  It captures it instantly and lets you save it as an image and I've never seen a rendering error in any of the pages I have captured.  I'm sure there must be other things that can do the same thing, but they are certainly not as easy to find as a lot of other software to perform basic tasks like that.

The screen capture programs I've used, including Screenshot Captor, use a method that scrolls the page and I'm guessing maybe stitches multiple screenshots together somehow as it scrolls?  But I have found them to be highly finicky and unreliable and can't get them to work many times. Kudos to Screenshot Captor though that has many tweaks that allow you to adjust for different conditions to try to get the shot.  It's the best attempt at that feature I've seen even though I still find I am unable to get reliable scrolls many times.

So my question must be obvious by now.  Why can't Screenshot Captor use whatever method qSnap uses to convert a scrolled area to an image instead of this apparently different method that requires a finicky automatic scroll?

I'm guessing that the main reason is that Screenshot Captor has to have a generalized approach that works in a broad range of applications whereas qSnap only has to work in Firefox and therefore can use some other method specific to Firefox.  But I'd like to know more about specifically why this can't be done that way in say Screenshot Captor.  It's so difficult to find something that can simply and reliably take a snapshot of a full scrolling web page (or a scrolled page in other applications) and convert it to an image without all the tweaking and finger crossing!  I don't mean to imply that it is a simple thing from a technical point of view, but from a users point of view it is so basic!

Any light you can shine on this would be welcome!  It's always stumped me. ... but then I'm easy to stump!  :-[

PS: The Fireshot add-on for Firefox performs a capture similar to that of qSnap.  Instant and perfect rendering every time.

mouser:
Browser addons have a much easier job of capturing a scrolling image from a browser just by nature of the fact that they are integrated with the browser -- they can tell the browser what to do and have easy access to getting exactly the window contents, etc.

Have you tried the new Screenshot Captor "manual" scrolling capture method? It takes a few more clicks but once you get used to it the procedure is pretty straightforward and the results are predictable.

Regardless, i don't think there is any shame in using a browser addon/plugin to capture scrolling web pages, and use a screenshot tool in other cases.

SuperMan:
As always thank you for your reply mouser!  I have not yet tried that manual feature, but I will give it a whirl.  Even though the automatic kind of scroll method doesn't seem to always work well I do think that SC's scrolling capture feature is a brilliant piece of work though.  I think it gives you the best chance of getting the shot.

Usually, if I want to do a scrolling capture, it is in a browser.  So yes, the add-ons are probably best for that for the reasons you gave.

To be fair, I run my browser in a sandbox.  So there is an extra layer of mush that SC has to deal with.  That may be part of the problem.  The sandbox does cause problems with some things and maybe this is one of them.

The real challenge is to get scrolling captures in other applications besides browsers.  It's so hard to get consistent results with anything.  I guess that may be because each program works differently in one way or another and its hard to make a universal tool that can deal with every contingency.

mouser:
The real challenge is to get scrolling captures in other applications besides browsers.  It's so hard to get consistent results with anything.  I guess that may be because each program works differently in one way or another and its hard to make a universal tool that can deal with every contingency.
--- End quote ---

that's why i finally added a "manual" method into SC's scrolling capture.  once you get used to the way it works, it's hard to go wrong with it.

SuperMan:
Know what?  I need to do more work to understand this better.  When I tried it this time, the automatic scrolling was working really well on Firefox (except for the fact that it is also capturing the whole firefox application window and not just the page being browsed).  Manual scrolling also worked really well.  I think that the problem I had may have had to do with the sandbox.  I am getting an error message related to DDE data before the capture takes place.  This may be the problem.

What I have not been able to figure out how to do is to capture just the browser web page window without the Firefox tabs and toolbars appearing at the top of each scrolled page.  I'm thinking maybe this is the problem caused by the DDE failure?  I never seem to get a chance to select just that window and not the entire application window.

But the exciting part is that Screenshot Captor is scrolling like a champ now!

Does any of this make any sense?  :tellme:

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