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I happily use bitmap screen captures. I take them in SnagIt, drop them
into Photoshop, doctor them up and/or annotate them as necessary, save
them as GIFs, and put them in documents/web pages/online help.
I want the screen captures to look identical to what's on the user's
screen. If you're computer-literate and you're familiar with an
application--which you are, if you're the tech writer--you can easily
tell what elements are cosmetic and what elements matter. But novice
users may have trouble with that. If something's different, they may
at least have to spend a moment pondering whether that means
something, whether they're on the right screen, etc. Even if those
folks are only *part* of my audience, I don't want to confuse them,
and I'd need a pretty good reason to do so.
Bitmap problems? You can avoid them by not resizing. I don't use
full-screen captures; I crop them to show the relevant section of the
screen. Instead of one shrunken full-screen capture, I might have six
smaller-but-full-size images woven into the document. (Or in the case
of one 200-page manual I worked on, roughly 700 smaller images.)
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