I'd like to do a screen capture the active window on a Win32 OS, an Internet Explorer window to be specific, and ulitimately save it as a GIF.

Right now I'm doing that by launching a screen capture program with Win32::Process::Create and sending it the appropriate keystrokes to capture the window with the send_keys method of its Win32::CtrlGUI::Window object.

Kind of clunky. Since Windows has a built in Screen Capture and active window capture to the clipboard (ALT+PrintScrn), I'd like to use that. But how do I do it? What "window" would I be sending the keystrokes to? And even then, the send_keys method doesn't seem to support the "PrintScrn" key.

Getting it out of the clipboard and saving it as a GIF I can deal with later :) Does anyone happen to know, does the ImageMagick module support LZW gifs these days?

This is ultimately going to be a web service for non Win32 Web developers who need to see what their sites look like in Internet Explorer on Windows.

In reply to Win32 screen capture by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.