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RE: screenshots - to crop or resize, that is the question...
Subject:RE: screenshots - to crop or resize, that is the question... From:"Kane, Beth" <Beth -dot- Kane -at- ncslearn -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 21 May 2002 12:48:57 -0500
Hi Jennifer,
I would not crop a screen shot, in most cases. If it goes outside my text
margins, that's fine. One company where I worked for 5 years produced lots
of STC award-winning books that had screen shots bumping out of the left
side of the text margins all over the place. (Our templates had plenty of
white space on the left.)
The size of our screen shots was dictated by the readability of the text
inside them. We tried to keep all of them showing the text around a certain
size -- quite small, but still readable. The size of the windows/dialog
boxes in our GUIs varied a lot.
If it's a truly gigantic screen shot that would take up a whole page or
something to still be readable, then I guess I would have to crop it, and
discuss each pertinent section of the screen one at a time. It sounds like
that might be the case in your GUI.
Cropping runs the risk of the screen shot not looking totally recognizable
to the user. So when you have to crop, it's best to prominently state that
you're showing just one section of the xyz window (upper left, lower right,
upper half, center, first column, etc.). I've also seen a lot of people
place some sort of ragged-edge graphic on the edges that are cropped.
As with everything, the answer to whether to crop is "it depends."
Beth Kane
Sr. Technical Writer
Services & Systems Support
NCS Learn, an NCS Pearson business
5451 E. Williams Blvd., #151
Tucson, Arizona 85711
Phone: 520.784.7048 or
1.800.937.6682, x7048
beth -dot- kane -at- ncslearn -dot- com
www.ncslearn.com
-----Original Message-----
I want to ask everyone's opinion about screenshots. I am writing a user
guide that includes what seems like nine million screenshots. Quite often
they don't fit in (horizontally) the pages of my Framemaker templates, so
I'm faced with either resizing the screenshots or cropping them and losing
what often turns out to be a couple fields.
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