Screen scraping methods
From Screen Scraper Studio
Contents |
Why more scraping methods?
ScreenScraper offers more than one method of doing screen scraping. It largely depends on the target application technology and your requirements what method works best in a particular case. Read below the pros and cons of each method.
Native method
- Pros
- 100% accuracy.
- Very fast.
- Preserves text layout.
- Can precisely get the position on the screen of text fragments.
- Can get text font and color.
- Cons
- Rarely the screen region that is captured flickers. We did a lot of work to ensure minimal or zero flickering but under heavy stress you might notify slight flickering. Usually this is not notifiable by users.
- Works only with apps that uses gdi to render text.
FullText method
- Pros
- 100% accuracy.
- Very fast.
- No flickering.
- Work with most technologies used to create user interfaces including Windows standard SDK, .Net Forms, Java, Flash, WPF.
- Cons
- Can get only the whole text of a UI control.
- Cannot get text font and color.
OCR method
- Pros
- Works on text that is displayed as a bitmap. Most notable type of apps where OCR is the only solution are Citrix presentation manager and Microsoft Remote desktop.
- Can precisely get the position on the screen of text fragments.
- Cons
- 95% accuracy. This can be improved with custom training for specific fonts. [Contact us] for more info.
- Slow compared with the other 2 methods though most tasks will take less than half a second.
