Thursday, June 15, 2006
Capturing browser windows
One thing that technical writers do a lot of (sometimes too much of) is take screen captures of the applications that they're documenting. If you're documenting a Web application and are using Firefox, you might want to take a look at ScreenGrab.
ScreenGrab is a Firefox extension that can take a snap of the full browser window, just the contents of the viewing area (avoids taking snaps of your custom tool bars), and a full shot of longer pages that you have to scroll through. The screen shots are saved as .png files.
ScreenGrab is still in its early stages of development, but it does work quite well. It has a few problems: it can choke on really long Web pages; it relies on Java (so you need to have a JRE properly installed and configured); and I haven't been able to make it work in Linux yet. Still, it's a decent little extension and very useful.
ScreenGrab is a Firefox extension that can take a snap of the full browser window, just the contents of the viewing area (avoids taking snaps of your custom tool bars), and a full shot of longer pages that you have to scroll through. The screen shots are saved as .png files.
ScreenGrab is still in its early stages of development, but it does work quite well. It has a few problems: it can choke on really long Web pages; it relies on Java (so you need to have a JRE properly installed and configured); and I haven't been able to make it work in Linux yet. Still, it's a decent little extension and very useful.
