Forum: Multi-Language Add-In for Visual Studio

Creating Screenshots of pages when exporting to Excel?

Posted by lingosmart on Wed 18 of Feb, 2009 11:05 GMT

Hello,

recently we wanted to translate some rather complicated pages (complicated layout) and one of our translators said it would be fine to have a screenshot of pages that are about to be translated. So the translator could see where and in which context a specific caption text is used.

Would it be possible to create screenshot of each page that is exported to excel and save those screenshots together with the Excel file?

I am not sure how difficult taking screenshots from the designer view of Visual Studio would be but that could be a great help for translators working on the Excel file!

What do you think about this idea?

Ciao,
Ralf

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Posted by Phil on Thu 19 of Feb, 2009 20:57 GMT Germany

Hello Ralf,

I think this would be a brilliant feature, but I don't really know how to do it.

I don't think Visual Studio would offer much support, so it would have to work like a screen capture program. The Add-In would have to open each Form, UserControl or ASP Page in turn, make a screen shot of the designer window, and then close the designer window.

I don't know how to make a screen shot, but that is probably not too difficult. However, it would probably be necessary to scroll the window to capture the full contents. This is something which SnagIt can do (at least vertically). Its a clever feature, but I don't often use it. This probably means making multiple screen shots and then joining them together.

Ideally, the screen shots should be converted to gif, png or some similar format, since bitmaps would be very big. This is not essential. Again I would have to learn how to do it.

The next problem that occurs to me is what to do with tabbed dialogs. You might want the Add-In to select each tab sheet in turn and make a separate screenshot. The same would apply to multiple step (wizard) dialogs. I'm sure there are other similar cases, where a single screenshot is just not enough

I would love to have this feature, but I don't know whether I will ever implement it.

Phil

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