Is there a cross-platform approach to taking screenshots from a firefox extension?
Ideally I'd like to be able to take a screenshot of a dom element (irrespective of whether it's visible on the page or not), something like:
var screenshot = screenshot(document.getElementById('example');
Any pointers or suggestions would be nice, searching https://developer.mozilla.org/ only yields screenshots they've used in various guides.
After examining the code of several extensions. I took the following approach (to take a snapshot of a particular dom element). This can be used in a Firefox extension to take screenshots of the whole page, to take screenshots of the browser window and to take screenshots of a particular dom element (and all of its child nodes):
- Add canvas to xul.
- Find dimensions and top-left co-ordinates of element.
- Copy portion of window to canvas.
- Convert canvas to base64 PNG file.
function getElementScreenshot(elm) {
var x = findPosX(elm);
var y = findPosY(elm);
var width = elm.clientWidth;
var height = elm.clientHeight;
var cnvs = document.getElementById("aCanvas");
cnvs.width = width;
cnvs.height = height;
var ctx = cnvs.getContext("2d");
// To take a snapshot of entire window
// ctx.drawWindow(mainWindow.content, 0, 0, mainWindow.innerWidth, mainWindow.innerHeight, "rgb(255,255,255)");
ctx.drawWindow(mainWindow.content, x, y, width, height, "rgb(255,255,255)");
return(cnvs.toDataURL());
}
To find top left coordinate of an element
function findPosX(obj) {
var curleft = 0;
if (obj.offsetParent) {
while (1) {
curleft += obj.offsetLeft;
if (!obj.offsetParent) {
break;
}
obj = obj.offsetParent;
}
} else if (obj.x) {
curleft += obj.x;
}
return curleft;
}
function findPosY(obj) {
var curtop = 0;
if (obj.offsetParent) {
while (1) {
curtop += obj.offsetTop;
if (!obj.offsetParent) {
break;
}
obj = obj.offsetParent;
}
} else if (obj.y) {
curtop += obj.y;
}
return curtop;
}
To get access to browser.xul from sidebar
var mainWindow = window.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor)
.getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIWebNavigation)
.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDocShellTreeItem)
.rootTreeItem
.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor)
.getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDOMWindow);
mainWindow.gBrowser.addTab(...);
Download one of the many Firefox screen capture extensions, and look at their code to see how they do it. Eg Screengrab, Fireshot, or Page Saver
I guess it would be something like this:
- Copy the DOM element in question to a separate iframe or browser (which is not visible to the user)
- Paint the window of that iframe onto an html canvas using drawWindow(). Check out the source of the Tab Preview addon to see how this is done.