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KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com asked the folowing:
SHORT VERSION
1) Do you create your own "fake" screen-caps with
a vector-drawing tool?
2) Can you think of any reasons not to do so, from
the user's perspective?
3) Would I be wrong in assuming that cosmetic aspects
of windows and dialog boxes are not that important,
and that as long as the text is there and readable,
and the surrounding elements are similar to the
originals, then that should be "good enough"?
"I hoped to get a feel for how many of you now "roll your own" screen
shots."
"Would anyone care to suggest disadvantages to this approach?"
"Do you think it likely that a user would be confused or
offended or distracted if the parts that I consider cosmetic
are not exact matches for what they see onscreen?"
_____________________________
Kevin:
I think that your approach was a common practice before PCs had gigabytes of
memory, and screens didn't have all the bells and whistles that they do
today.
In a job I did several years ago documenting an inventory management system
that ran on AS400's, we used a PC terminal emulator program to access the
AS400. The emulator gave us colored text on a black background, and the
whole Windows interface and toolbars GUI around it.
We did a simple <Ctrl><Alt><PrtScn> to capture the screen. Then we used
Corel Capture to select just the teminal screen image from the PrtScn image,
and copied it to PhotoPaint. In PhotoPaint we inverted the colors,
converted the image to black&white, increased the contrast to sharpen the
image, and then converted it to a line drawing image. With some practice, I
could do the whole process from a screendump to a finished image in the
document in 2-3 minutes. And the result was a simple black screen outline
with black text on the white page.
Essentialy, this was just what you are doing, only letting a sophisticated
graphics program do most of the work. The simplified screen images conveyed
all the essential information about each screen, without making the document
unnecessarily large. If it works, it makes sense to me.
Margaret Cekis
Margaret -at- mediaocean -dot- com
Atlanta GA
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