Patent ID: 8701001

Claim:
A system for screen capture, the system comprising: a bus system; a storage device connected to the bus system, wherein the storage device stores program code; and a processor connected to the bus system, wherein the processor executes the program code to: select a screen area at a source machine; determine properties of an open window displayed in the screen area, including determining position of the open window, and an application and current application data associated with the open window, by hooking file open calls for the application, wherein application programming interfaces of an operating system are used to gather information on the properties of the open window; use image processing to detect scroll bars within the application data of the open window; highlight an area of the screen area; annotate the screen area with comments; save metadata of the screen area, including the open window, highlighting of the area of the screen area, annotating of the screen area with comments, and the scroll bars, as a metadata file, wherein the metadata file re-creates the screen area including the open window with the application data in a correct position within the application; send the metadata file to a recipient machine, wherein an alternative application that is available on the recipient machine is used in response to the application being unavailable on the recipient machine; re-create the screen area at the recipient machine using the metadata file, wherein re-creating of the screen area includes retrieving and re-creating icons in the screen area, wherein a placeholder is used when an icon is not retrieved; apply a scaling factor to the re-created screen area in response to a screen size on the recipient machine being different from a screen size on the source machine; annotate the re-created screen area; update the metadata file with the annotating of the re-created screen area; and send the updated metadata file to the source machine.