How to take screen shot of an email inside “apple mail” and “entourage” in Mac OS X?

Question

I want to write an AppleScript or Cocoa application in Mac OS X which will take screen shot of the email inside AppleMail and Microsoft Entourage.

I did this by writing a simple AppleScript code but it takes the screen shot of the page. If email is a long one, I am unable to take screen shot of following pages.

Do you have any suggestion? Thanks.

Answer 1

Could you print the email to a PDF and convert it to an image?

Answer 2

This is an age old question, and a difficult one to solve.

The way I would solve it would be to take a screen shot (or preferably an image of the window) every few micro seconds as you scroll down. The reconstruct the image by matching lines of pixels.

Unfortunately I can't help you with the specifics of the programing, I'm guessing you have to dig down into the WindowServer or possibly even deeper to grab the screen image data.

Once you've got that, reconstruction will be relatively simple.

If it just long 'web pages' you need to capture you can always try SnapWeb it uses WebKit just like Safari and Mail, and will output long pages as one image, this at least solve half the problem.

Answer 3

It's probably not the answer you're after, but someone else has managed to solve this problem. There's a service called LitmusApp that does this for many email clients and platforms. Worth a look and they have a free version.

Answer 4

If you are trying to save the contents of email messages this app may be a good choice for that purpose.