Screen capture tutorial

Draft

This is a short screen capture tutorials

Grabing static pictures of applications

Use a screen capture tool

There are several kinds of tools:

• Small and usually free screen capturing utilities, e.g. MwSnap and ScreenHunter for Windows.
• Capturing tools embedded in image manipulation (or other) programs, e.g. The GIMP

To capture a screen there are usually three methods

• Capture the whole screen
• Capture a single application window
• Capture a rectangular area (you must click on a corner and then drag the mouse)
• Capture a fixed rectangular area (you define its size beforehand)

Print Screen Method

"Print Screen" means to make a copy of the whole screen:

On Windows XP

Hit the Print Screen key (sometimes labeled "Prnt Scrn") which you usually can find somewhere in the top right of your keyboard. On some other keyboards (I have swiss-french ones), you may have to hit shift-prnt scrn".

This operation will put the screen capture into the clip board. Therefore after pressin the key you won't see anything, so simply paste it into an imaging program with either one of the two methods:

• Acquire from Paste
  • In Gimp: "File->Acquire->Paste as New
• Paste into an open document, e.g. ctrl-v (but you may loose information depending on what editing software you are working with)

The print screen method seems to produce best results, since it seems to have less problems capturing some tricky multi-paned windows like the Adobe CS3 desktops for which all my screen capture tools didn't word (some tabs did not show).

On Ubuntu (Linux)

Hit the Print Screen key. It will caputure a *.png image and a preview/popup menu will allow to save it somewhere.

Grabing movies of user interactions

(to be written).

Software

Free screen capture programs

Windows

• MwSnap (the one I use
  • It has 5 capuring modes and is fast (minimizes to the tray)
  • Supports several file formats for saving
• Screen Hunter (free basic version, not tested).

Free image manipulation programs

In principle, they include some capturing tool

Multi-platform

• The GIMP (The GNU Imaging Program)
  • Free and sophisticated.

Windows

• IrfanView
• For those who have office installed (so I don't think it's free) there is the Microsoft Picture Manager (good enough for a little bit of cropping etc.)