Question

I am attempting to let users on my site push a button to take a screenshot of the current screen ( everything in body).

From my research, html2canvas seems to be a resource that makes this possible.

My issue is the documentation does not provide example code and I am struggling to get a grip on the steps involved.

http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/documentation.html

The following SO question ( How to upload a screenshot using html2canvas? ) leaves me a bit confused. I just want to know how to get an image at this point.

From his code.

$(window).ready(function(){
    ('body').html2canvas();
    var canvasRecord = new html2canvas(document.body).canvas;

     //At this point does the .toDataURL method return a png?
});

At this point I am lost where the image is, or even how/when to create it. Ill worry sending it to the server later.

Any information appreciated. Thanks! (html2canvas even needed?)

Answer 1

As you are using the html2canvas jQuery plugin, here is a sample snippet

var screenshot;

$('body').html2canvas({
  onrendered: function(canvas) {
    screenshot = canvas.toDataURL();

    //code to process/send the image to server
  }
});

In the above code snippet the html2canvas creates the screenshot of the page.

You can also use PhantomJS to create screenshots of webpages – provided that they are public pages, because you may not be able to access login protected pages on the server-side; in such situations only a client-side solution like html2canvas will work.