Hacker News Reader

Comment by jyvbn | Hacker News Reader

Great idea. I tried this addon now. One limitation I see is that it's only saving single screenshot for each URL, not full page. So on a long (vertically scrolling) page only a small part is saved.

View on HN

That's an interesting problem I think will all the screenshotting tools out there. If you want the full page the extension has to scroll down the page and stitch the individual pictures together. You'd think there would be a way to capture the whole page easily but it's quite the tricky problem.

I wrote a really basic ruby library to take full page screenshots: https://github.com/ctide/screenshotter/blob/master/lib/scree... using selenium & webdriver. Not great for a chrome extension, but useful nonetheless. :)

I'm pretty sure that a chrome extension can take a screenshot of the full page not just whats visible

EDIT: here it is: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/desktopCapture#metho...

Interesting. Will experiment with it and will push changes if successful. I guess the API is relatively new (Chrome 34) and I hadn't come across it, till now. Thanks!

That or just record what I've actually scrolled. Why would I archive content I've never seen?

Well, it's interesting. My main concern with capturing the entire tab as image is that the site being captured maybe one of those infinitely scrollable pages (i.e. same as the history.html page) in which case, depending on implementation, the tab may be very very long (tens of thousands of pixels in height) and 99% blank (if employing an infinite scroll mechanism that puts only the currently viewed items in the DOM)

Edit: so capturing on each scroll step (over say 3 seconds) > $('body').height()/3 and grouping the multiple screenshots under the given item is one possible way. Thanks for your thought.

Yes, I've used wkhtmltopdf for that, but I don't think it works if the page requires authentication, or you want to check what happens if you have particular cookies set.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com