This package provides a command for taking screenshots of an individual frame. It also support setting up the frame according to simple predetermined rules.

This package uses the import and convert binaries from the imagemagick package.

• Create a file containing the setup for the package you want to take a screenshot of in the directory where the image files should be placed.

  This is a slightly modified copy of the file I used to take a screenshot for moody.

  (require 'frameshot)
  (load-file "github-readme.el")
  
  (frameshot-setup
   '((name   . "moody")
     (height . 200)
     (width  . 888)
     (shadow . ((color   . "black")
                (opacity . 60)
                (sigma   . 7)
                (x       . 3)
                (y       . 4)))))
  
  (load-file "moody-init.el") ; contains (use-package moody ...)
  (find-file "moody-init.el") ; show that example in the screenshot
  (message "")
      

• Start Emacs and load that file and possibly make some manual adjustments, like positioning the cursor as desired.

  Given the above configuration I would have done this like so:

  cd ~/git/web/emacsair.me/assets/readme
  emacs --load moody.el
      

  Note that I didn’t use -Q. Not doing that has the advantage that you don’t have to do anything special to load the features that you would like to take a screenshot of, like adjusting the load-path. On the other hand you might have to turn off some features that you do not want to appear in the screenshot. You will have to decide what is best for your use-case.

• Finally create a screenshot by pressing [f8]. If you did some manual setup, then you might have to clear the minibuffer first. Press [f7] to do so. You can also press [f6] to run frame-setup on the selected frame again.

  The resulting screenshot looks like this:

• Then you likely want to rename the created screenshots files because frameshot-take adds a timestamp to the file-names (so that you can take multiple screenshots without having to worry about overwriting an older one).

  mv 19700101:00:00:00-minions.png minions.png
      

• And finally you probably want to publish your screenshot(s). This package does not handle that step, but you might want to look into my setup for a quick way of doing that.

  The README.org of minions contains.

  [[http://readme.emacsair.me/moody.png]]
      

  I can update that screenshot following the above steps and then running:

  git add .
  cd ../..
  make publish-readme
      

  Github caches images for a very long time unless it is told not to by using no-cache as the value of the HTTP Cache-Control header.

  If you are interested in such a setup, then have a look at the emacsair.me build tools, in particular the Makefile and the files in asserts/readme.