Every once in a while, there appears an occasion when you need to take a snapshot of the current screen as proof of something, or something else. Most of the times, that PrintScreen key comes in great and raises to your standards although it does not offer quite the flexibility of a utility specially designed to take snippets of the screen. It will simply take a snap of the entire screen and, if you want to cut something out, you'll need an image editor for the job.

However, in the case of web pages the choices are few, as not any screen-shooting instrument is apt for the job. The complications reside in the fact that a web page generally extends beyond the screen limits and an application can only capture what is visible on the screen. Well, do not fret, as technology has provided the necessary means to overcome this little inconvenient. HTMLCapture ActiveX Control is one nifty application specially designed to take the picture of any web page on the Internet in just as much time as it takes to load the page.

The application is not for the average user as it is designed to help in programming tasks. The app is actually an ActiveX component that can be used with almost all programming languages in order to take snapshots of web pages or, better yet, to convert HTML representation into a full range of image formats. Working with the small app is piece of cake even if you have no programming skills and all you want is take a webshot of some website.

HTMLCapture comes complete with a set of samples written in several languages (ASP, ASP.net, BCB, C#, Delphi, Java, Perl, PHP, VB, VBScript, etc.) as a demonstration of its powers, and the documentation for making the most of it is comprehensive enough for a developer.

It works by simply typing in the desired web address and the app will automatically take the screenshot of the entire page in no time. There are no complicated menus to deal with and the set of options for taking the snapshot are not too complicated, either. Users get to set the rendering engine (IE or Firefox supported only), define the delay time and timeout values, set the browser size and zoom ratio.

As for the content, you can decide what type should be captured. HTMLCapture provides the possibility of giving up certain elements in the webpage, like images, ActiveX, Java elements, scripts or video. This way, the user has full control over the elements in the webpage that are being captured. For accessing secured pages requiring access credentials, the application makes available a field to complete with username and password so there really should not be any problems here, either.

Saving the image is not an operation limited to providing a storage location for the file, but you will also have to make some settings for the best results. Thus HTMLCapture permits clipping the image to whatever size you want (this means that you can capture any part of the page you want), turn it into a thumbnail, or trim the margins in order to get rid of unwanted elements. There is an entire set up process at your disposal, ready to help you shape up the output result the way you want it.

The list of file formats HTMLCapture can turn a web page into is not too shabby, covering all popular image formats (BMP, PNG, GIF, JPG) as well as vector image formats like EMF or WMF (unfortunately saving the files under these formats failed). But the surprise comes from the fact that you can also save the page in PDF format and, with a little effort, the result can be a multi-page PDF file.

Although the interface is not providing too much functionality (and definitely does not justify the $199 on the price tag), all the fun with using HTMLCapture lies in programming. It can be used to take snapshots of an entire list of web pages at once (batch snapshotting), save the webpages as multi-page PDF documents or separate a long webpage into several images. All the examples are included in the installation folder but unfortunately not all of them works. We tried them randomly and from all tested only Visual Basic demos worked like a charm showing the full force of the component.

The application uses a simple screen allowing you to take the webshots with little to no effort at all. Output result can be saved under the most popular image formats and you can also create multiple paged PDF documents with the utmost ease. The demos provided with the installation prove the extended purposes and functionality of the application as well as its efficiency. However, not all the demos worked in our case and attempting to save the results under vectorial image formats failed every time.


The Good

HTMLCapture makes for a very good web page capturing tool, allowing wide customization of the resulting file and of the way it is handled.

The component is able of taking a snapshot of a webpage and save it into multiple image files. HTMLCapture can convert a webpage at your choice into a multi-page PDF document very easily.

The Bad

Not all demos work as they should and this works only in the detriment of the component. VBScript was the only language that showed only working demos.

The price seems a bit high, although it has been adjusted to lower values.

We could not save under any of the two vectorial image formats, EMF and WMF, no matter what.

The Truth

The application does a great job with capturing the webpages in their entirety and saving them under popular image formats, but there are still glitches to be fixed. HTMLCapture brings quite a set of demos for different programming languages in order to prove its value, but, during our testing, PHP files failed at almost all demonstrations. With VBScript, however, all demos worked like a charm.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: