Pearl Crescent Page Saver Documentation (Basic & Pro Editions)

If the page you are viewing contains any frames or iframes, the Save Image of Entire Frame item will provide a menu that contains a list of each top-level frame on the page that may be captured.

In Firefox 3, check the Arrange to Capture Flash Content menu item to have Page Saver alter certain pages as they load to make it possible to capture the Flash content. Enabling this feature may cause some pages that contain Flash content to load incorrectly. Learn more.

PROIn Page Saver Pro, you may also use the toolbar menu to choose a destination for the image (a local file, your computer's clipboard, or, if configured, an FTP, HTTP, or HTTPS server).

The toolbar menu also contains a Send Feedback... item which takes you to a form on the Pearl Crescent web site and a Page Saver Options... item which may be used to open the options window.

To change the position of the toolbar item or remove it, open the Customize Toolbar window via Firefox's View | Toolbars | Customize... menu item.

To hide one or more of the Page Saver context menu items, uncheck the appropriate checkbox on the Page Saver options window's General tab.

The contents of the page will be dimmed and a large “cross hair” mouse pointer will appear. You can then click and drag the mouse to highlight a region on the page (note that automatic scrolling of the page is not supported). After you release the mouse button, you may adjust the size and position of the region.

To complete the capture, click the Capture button. To cancel the capture, press the Esc key.

From the Page Saver option window's General tab, you may make capturing a region the default action and you may add a keyboard shortcut. Refer to the section Customizing Page Saver for more information.

By default, images captured from the command line are saved to Firefox's Download Folder. You can set this location from the Downloads section of the Firefox Options window. In Page Saver Pro, the -saveas command line flag may be used to specify the file path where images are saved (see below).

For more information about using Firefox from the command line, refer to this mozillaZine article.

To control the size of the browser window that is opened, use the -width and -height flags to specify the window width and height in pixels. For example:

To specify a delay before capturing a page, use the -savedelay flag (this is useful for pages that add content after the initial page load is complete). The delay specified is in milliseconds. For example, to specify a one second delay, use a command such as:

To capture Flash content, include the -captureflash flag (this is an alternative to checking the arrange to capture Flash content box in the Page Saver Options). For example:

PROIn Page Saver Pro, include the -saveas flag on the command line to specify a directory, a file, or a server location (URL) where the image will be saved. You may also specify the word clipboard to place a copy of the captured image on the system clipboard (on Linux, this feature requires Firefox 3). Here is an example that uses a file path:

You may also use a file name pattern to specify the file name. For example, to include the page title in the file name, use a command like this:

To upload the captured image to a server, specify an ftp://, http://, or https:// URL using the -saveas flag. If a password is needed and it has not been saved in the Firefox Password Manager, you will need to include the password in the URL. For example:

By default, Page Saver will append a file name to the URL before uploading the captured image using FTP or HTTP PUT. However, if the URL ends with .png, .jpg, or .jpeg it will be used "as is" to upload to a specific file. For example, to upload a captured image to a file named img42.png, use a command similar to the following:

PROIn Page Saver Pro, the -saveoptions command line flag may be used to control additional aspects of the image capture process. Separate multiple options with a comma. The available options are:

visible — capture the visible portion of the page instead of the entire page.
maxwait=ms — wait at most ms milliseconds for the page to load. A slow page load is stopped and an image of the partially loaded page is captured.
refreshmaxwait=ms — wait at most ms milliseconds for a page that contains a meta refresh directive to load the next page.
delay=ms — wait an extra ms milliseconds after the page has finished loading before capturing the image (this works the same as the -savedelay flag).
top=pixelval — omit from the captured image the first pixelval pixels along the top of the page.
left=pixelval — omit from the captured image the first pixelval pixels along the left side of the page.
bottom=pixelval — crop the captured image along the bottom at pixelval pixels.
right=pixelval — crop the captured image along the right side at pixelval pixels.
element=elementID — capture the region occupied by the first DOM element on the page with an id of elementID. If more than one element=elementID value is included in -saveoptions then each element will be captured as a separate image. If no element with the ID specified exists within the page, then no image is captured and an error is reported. Tip: to include the element ID in the name of the image files that are saved, add %i to the the file name pattern (located on the Image Capture tab within the Page Saver Pro options window).
scale=scaleval — reduce or limit the size of the captured image. If scaleval ends with a % character, the image is scaled to the specified percentage. If scaleval is a simple integer, the largest dimension of the resulting image will be at most scaleval pixels.
format=imagetype — use imagetype as the output format when saving images to a local file or to a server. The choices for imagetype are:
- png
- png@transparency=none (PNG format without transparency information)
- jpeg
- jpeg@quality=Q (JPEG format with a quality of Q — ranging from 0 to 100)

Each time Page Saver is run from the command line, it will write a one-line status message to the standard error stream. The status message will consist of the text PageSaver:CaptureComplete followed by an integer result code and an optional text string that provides more detailed information. For example, for a successful capture the message might look like this:

On Microsoft Windows, you must start Firefox with the -console flag to see the Page Saver status messages. Since Page Saver opens a new window for each capture and closes it after the capture is done, while you are experimenting with various Page Saver command line flags you may want to first start a copy of Firefox with the -console flag only and then run additional Firefox commands that include Page Saver options. For example:

Table 1 lists all of the the result codes that may be returned in the PageSaver:CaptureComplete messages.

Here is another example: if the -saveas option is used in Page Saver Pro and an invalid file path is provided, the status line will contain a result code of 7:

For successful requests, the PageSaver:CaptureComplete message will include the HTTP status code (if available) in the form HTTP:statuscode (where statuscode is replaced by 200, 404, and so on).

In addition, if the meta-refresh maximum wait time was exceeded, the text refreshmaxwait will be included (separated from other information by a comma).

If the maximum page load time was exceeded, the text maxwait will be included (separated from other information by a comma).

When a command line capture fails with Result Code 12 (request error), the PageSaver:CaptureComplete message will include detailed error information. First, a hexadecimal Mozilla error code will be output. For common errors, the name of the error will also be output. Here are some examples:


PageSaver:CaptureComplete 12 (failure)-0x804b001e NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST

PageSaver:CaptureComplete 12 (failure)-0x804b000d NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

PageSaver:CaptureComplete 12 (failure)-0x805d001e NS_ERROR_MALWARE_URI

PageSaver:CaptureComplete 12 (failure)-0x804b001f NS_ERROR_REDIRECT_LOOP

The most common Mozilla errors are defined in these two source code files:

nsError.h
nsNetError.h

Customizing Page Saver

You may customize Page Saver's behavior by adjusting various options. Use one of the following two methods to open the Page Saver options window:

Figure 4 — Page Saver Pro General Options

Choose Page Saver Options... from the menu associated with the Page Saver toolbar item.
Open the Firefox Add-ons window and double-click on Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic or Pearl Crescent Page Saver Pro.

Use the General tab (shown in Figure 4) to control which portion of the page is captured by default, to set keyboard shortcuts, and to control which Page Saver items appear in the browser context menu. In order for changes to the keyboard shortcut settings to take effect, you need to open a new window or restart Firefox.

Use the Image Capture tab (shown in Figure 5) to specify a pattern for file names, to choose whether or not to be prompted for the file name and location, to choose whether or not to overwrite existing local files, to limit the size of saved images, to set the image format and its corresponding options, and to choose whether a sound is played after capturing each image.

On Windows and Linux, you can arrange to capture Flash content by checking the appropriate box. Learn more.

Figure 5 — Page Saver Pro Image Capture Options

The file name pattern is used by Page Saver to construct the file name. The following character sequences are replaced with values taken from the page title, page URL, and the date and time of the capture:

%t — the page title (replacing characters that cannot be used in file names with a hyphen).
%Y — the year, e.g., 2009.
%m — the month, e.g., 10 for October.
%d — the day of the month, e.g., 31 for the 31st day of the month.
%H — the hour using a 24 hour clock, e.g., 23 for 11pm.
%M — minutes.
%S — seconds.
%u — the page URL (location).
%5 — an MD5 hash of the page URL. This is useful when integrating with services such as the del.icio.us JSON feeds.
PRO%i — element ID specified on command line.
%% — a '%' character.

The prompt checkbox will determine whether you will be prompted before saving an image to a local file. If the overwrite checkbox is checked, existing files are overwritten without prompting; if it is not checked, Page Saver will generate a unique file name by appending (1), (2), etc. to the name. The overwrite option is only consulted if the prompt checkbox is not checked or if Page Saver is invoked from the command line.

If JPEG format is chosen, you may specify the image quality which is an integer value that ranges from 0 to 100 (with 100 providing the best quality). Since JPEG uses lossy compression while PNG uses lossless compression, PNG is a better choice when the best quality image is needed.

Figure 6 — Page Saver Pro Header and Footer Options

PROIn Page Saver Pro, use the Header and Footer tab (shown in Figure 6) to include a header or footer in each captured image.

The header and footer text patterns accept the same formatting characters as the file name pattern (located on the Image Capture tab).

There are also four hidden preferences that control the height and text format for the header and footer:

pagesaver.header.height —
height of header in pixels.
pagesaver.header.style —
CSS format for header text.
pagesaver.footer.height —
height of footer in pixels.
pagesaver.footer.style —
CSS format for footer text.

These hidden preferences may be modified using Firefox's about:config advanced configuration editor.

Figure 7 — Page Saver Pro Destination Options

PROIn Page Saver Pro, use the Destination tab (shown in Figure 7) to choose a destination for captured images (a local file, your computer's clipboard, or a server), and to enter the location, user name, and password for an HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP server. HTTP servers must be configured to accept PUT requests.

By default, Page Saver will append a file name to the URL before uploading each captured image. However, if the URL ends with .png, .jpg, or .jpeg it will used "as is" and all captured images will be uploaded to the same location.

Known Issues and Limitations

Page content generated by plugins may not be included in saved images. This is caused by a limitation in Firefox; see Mozilla bug 313462.
However, Flash-based content can be captured in Firefox 3. Learn more.
If a page contains frames or iframes, when the entire page is captured only the visible portion of each frame is included. To capture the entire contents of a frame, choose the frame from the Save Image of Entire Frame menu within the Page Saver toolbar menu, or use the Save Image of This Entire Frame... browser context menu item.
On Windows and Mac OS, the largest dimension of saved images is 32,767 pixels (width or height). On Linux, the limit is 32,766 pixels. Images of larger pages are cropped.
On Linux, saving an image to the clipboard is not supported in Firefox 2.
When saving images to an FTP server in Page Saver Pro, sometimes an error message is not displayed when it should be (especially when the image is small).
When capturing pages from the command line, web pages that display modal dialog boxes may prevent Page Saver from closing the browser window (effectively stalling Page Saver). For example, this occurs when a web page calls the JavaScript confirm() function. Pearl Crescent Do Not Disturb provides a solution to this and similar problems.
Only one page capture may be processed at a time. When running from the command line, wait for the PageSaver:CaptureComplete message before issuing the next capture command.
If the Tab Mix Plus extension is installed and its “Single Window Mode” option is enabled, Page Saver will not capture images when run from the command line. To avoid this problem, disable Single Window Mode or uninstall Tab Mix Plus.
If you are using the Google Analytics site and have Page Saver's Arrange to Capture Flash Content option checked, Google's date range selector is not displayed correctly. To avoid this problem, temporarily uncheck the Arrange to Capture Flash Content option and reload the Google Analytics page.

Additional Assistance

If you need more help or have a suggestion for us, please send email or use our feedback form.

Other Information

Page Saver Basic Extension GUID:

{c151d79e-e61b-4a90-a887-5a46d38fba99}

Page Saver Pro Extension GUID:

{7e5323bb-4c75-4c7e-8383-612a65a6d61e}

Authors and Contributors:

Kathleen Brade
Mark Smith
Tomas Marek (cs-CZ locale)
Finn Sørensen (da-DK locale)
Wawuschel, Team erweiterungen.de (de-DE locale)
Demetris Kikizas op111.net (el-GR locale)
Urko (es-ES locale)
Jean-Bernard Marcon (fr-FR locale)
Robert Martucci, Underpass, www.extenzilla.org (it-IT locale)
Norah Marinkovic (ja-JP locale)
Hunmin Kim (ko-KR locale)
Markh (nl-NL locale)
vatzec (pl-PL locale)
Eduardo Rapoport, Rodrigo Bergmann Laurindo (pt-BR locale)
Alexander Sokolov (ru-RU locale)
SlovakSoft (sk-SK locale)
Martin Srebotnjak (sl-SI locale)
KenanBalamir, doctor_jivago (tr-TR locale)
Myroslav Holyak (uk-UA locale)
Xiao Wenming, fiag (zh-CN locale)
Jia Heui, Lin; Rex Tsai; Unicorn2 (zh-TW locale)