FireFox Take Screenshot Feature - Add PDF format

[ml-mozilla]

I think the recently added "Take Screenshot" feature in Firefox (from the right-click mouse menu on a web page) is a great enhancement.   Currently the .png format is the default and .jpg can be manually chosen for each screenshot.  Please consider adding a PDF format option and let us specificy the default screenshot format to make this feature even more valuable.  

[Jon]

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[sfoster]

We currently only support .png as the Screenshots output format. There used to be an option for .jpeg but (I think?) that has been entirely removed at this point.

We are starting to explore ideas around capturing and saving/sharing other formats, but I need to clarify if you expect the PDF would be the bitmap PNG image wrapped in a PDF, or an actual PDF with the text content of the area you've selected. The latter is more interesting to me. You can print a whole page to PDF, but we don't currently have any way to isolate a region or fragment of a document and turn that into a PDF.

[Masoudahmadig]

Thank you very much,Good

[Anonymous]

A shortcut (with maybe options to format the filesnames)  for  

CTRL+P  > Destination "Save to PDF"

is fine.

... and likely a lot easier and quicker to add. 😉

[sfoster]

Sadly, adding (application global) keyboard shortcuts is anything but easy. It is essentially impossible to find one not already mapped by either Firefox or another application commonly used by some subset of our users, somewhere in the world. We already regularly run into conflicts.

There is an interesting overlap in functionality here between Screenshots and Printing in this case, and I can see the need to optimize something like this as its a part of lots of workflows, where people need to do the same thing over and over again throughout the day. I think we can bear that in mind as we consider the best way to answer this use case.

[ml-mozilla]

I typically use the right-click context menu to initiate a screen shot in Firefox rather than the CTRL+SHIFT+S keyboard shortcut documented here:  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/take-screenshots-firefox

It would be nice just to be able to control the default download file format via an about:config setting and perhaps that would not be so involved to implement. 

If the screen shot feature saves any of the data to a non-local storage device this should be clearly disclosed.  The explanation of the screen shot feature here: https://screenshots.firefox.com/ omits any discussion of interim data storage and data collection and the more detailed support article above links to general privacy policies and detailed screenshot metrics schema info for developer types. 

[carmelo]

👍Interesting idea, obviously the PDF will have to keep the original layout or a custom layout.🙏

[Zsoltisan]

Hi, the firefox team made some update and the "take screenshot" menu, from the mouse right click is doesn't work. Few days ago (or so) is worked. I loved it, that I can make screenshot not only from the entire screen but from the appropriate part of it... But now when I click to it, nothing happen 😞

[JonJ]

May I add to this thread please:

As useful as the feature is, the 'copy' function does not allow paste into much I've tried or the desktop. The download function only saves in PNG format which isn't much liked for uploading elsewhere. Can we not have the possibility to chose a download familiar file format, e.g. JPEG and PDF? (As is mentioned in conversation above.)

Also, can we not have a facility to print a screenshot? That is to send directly to a print function. That would be very useful as one could print just the parts of web-pages required, not all the dross, white space, page breaks in wrong places and in some cases huge length (multitude of print pages). I'm no expert, but sending to a print function could, I beleive, potentially open up a whole load of user choices.

[debk]

I greatly appreciate the screenshot option and how well it works, except for the format. When taken, I want to make notes in the Tags or Comments section of the Details tab under file Properties - ie to note the website, etc.  Not possible with PNG or BMP.

Mostly I use for it pictures, as I want a thumbnail of the file I have downloaded, so PDF would not work for me.

[Alexander-Wilms]

> I need to clarify if you expect the PDF would be the bitmap PNG image wrapped in a PDF, or an actual PDF with the text content of the area you've selected.

I would expect the latter. This way one would have the best of both: The original layout is preserved and text can be searched, copied etc.

[ml-mozilla]

An actual PDF with searchable text certainly would be better, but I haven't been using the "Take Screenshot" feature much recently because I was getting a lot of "something unexpected happened" type errors in which it would freeze.    I just ran a few tests now to see if I could recreate the error and it seems more stable now so I'll start to use it again.   I see that some bugs were reported and fixed related to this feature. 

[ml-mozilla]

Yes, the latter is better.  

[sfoster]

> It would be nice just to be able to control the default download file format via an about:config setting and perhaps that would not be so involved to implement. 

I think we're more likely to keep track of the last choice you made and set that to the initial/default file format. If we add a preference we have to add UI to highlight and change that preference. We quickly get into a position where there are lots of options and they are either overwhelming/distracting, or hard to find. But using the previous choice seems like it would meet the requirement here?

[ml-mozilla]

Great point, and I agree that sounds like a better approach.   Thanks for your thoughtful analysis here.