Take a screenshot of a webpage with JavaScript?

I have done this for an HTA by using an ActiveX control. It was pretty easy to build the control in VB6 to take the screenshot. I had to use the keybd_event API call because SendKeys can't do PrintScreen. Here's the code for that:

Declare Sub keybd_event Lib "user32" _
(ByVal bVk As Byte, ByVal bScan As Byte, ByVal dwFlags As Long, ByVal dwExtraInfo As Long)

Public Const CaptWindow = 2

Public Sub ScreenGrab()
   keybd_event &H12, 0, 0, 0
   keybd_event &H2C, CaptWindow, 0, 0
   keybd_event &H2C, CaptWindow, &H2, 0
   keybd_event &H12, 0, &H2, 0
End Sub

That only gets you as far as getting the window to the clipboard.

Another option, if the window you want a screenshot of is an HTA would be to just use an XMLHTTPRequest to send the DOM nodes to the server, then create the screenshots server-side.

This might not be the ideal solution for you, but it might still be worth mentioning.

Snapsie is an open source, ActiveX object that enables Internet Explorer screenshots to be captured and saved. Once the DLL file is registered on the client, you should be able to capture the screenshot and upload the file to the server withing JavaScript. Drawbacks: it needs to register the DLL file at the client and works only with Internet Explorer.

We had a similar requirement for reporting bugs. Since it was for an intranet scenario, we were able to use browser addons (like Fireshot for Firefox and IE Screenshot for Internet Explorer).

This question is old but maybe there's still someone interested in a state-of-the-art answer:

You can use getDisplayMedia:

https://github.com/ondras/browsershot

You can achieve that using HTA and VBScript. Just call an external tool to do the screenshotting. I forgot what the name is, but on Windows Vista there is a tool to do screenshots. You don't even need an extra install for it.

As for as automatic - it totally depends on the tool you use. If it has an API, I am sure you can trigger the screenshot and saving process through a couple of Visual Basic calls without the user knowing that you did what you did.

Since you mentioned HTA, I am assuming you are on Windows and (probably) know your environment (e.g. OS and version) very well.

If you are willing to do it on the server side, there are options like PhantomJS, which is now deprecated. The best way to go would be Headless Chrome with something like Puppeteer on Node.JS. Capturing a web page using Puppeteer would be as simple as follows:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});

  await browser.close();
})();

However it requires headless chrome to be able to run on your servers, which has some dependencies and might not be suitable on restricted environments. (Also, if you are not using Node.JS, you might need to handle installation / launching of browsers yourself.)

If you are willing to use a SaaS service, there are many options such as

• Restpack
• UrlBox
• Screenshot Layer

As of today Apr 2020 GitHub library html2Canvas https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas

GitHub 20K stars | Azure pipeles : Succeeded | Downloads 1.3M/mo |

quote : " JavaScript HTML renderer The script allows you to take "screenshots" of webpages or parts of it, directly on the users browser. The screenshot is based on the DOM and as such may not be 100% accurate to the real representation as it does not make an actual screenshot, but builds the screenshot based on the information available on the page.

I made a simple function that uses rasterizeHTML to build a svg and/or an image with page contents.

Check it out :

https://github.com/orisha/tdg-screen-shooter-pure-js