Re: Screen capture for online viewing

[Tom Herme <hermet -at- DNINEVADA -dot- COM>]

For full screen captures, I simply perform the the Alt + Print Screen, paste it
into my Word document, and then scale it down. How much I scale varies on how
much detail is on the screen and on how much of that detail I need to show.
You're absolutely right that you will quickly lose detail, and for that reason I
typically only include full screen captures for giving the reader a landmark. A
full screen capture in a manual only confirms for the reader that he/she is at
the correct location in the program for the content that follows.

I prefer taking more care in those screen captures that point out detail to the
reader. In that case, I'll crop logical sections of a full screen (for example,
a related set of fields) and scale them to perhaps no less than 80 percent of
the original. This limits the bitmap degradation that easily occurs. If you have
dialog boxes alone that approach nearly the full screen in size, you could take
the same approach that I've described here. Use the capture of the full screen
only for familiarity and chop it up for detailed descriptions of related
functions within the dialog.

Your tools can make all the difference in the quality of your edited screen
captures.

Hope this helps.

Tom

Larry Hoffenberg wrote:

> Greetings All,
>
> For a variety of reasons (with which I generally concur), my client wants to
> include screen captures in the training materials we are going to publish on
> our intranet. The problem is that most of our application's dialog boxes are
> near full-screen in size, so we want to resample them down to as small as
> possible while maintaining legibility. We can't seem to get below about an
> 85% reduction before loosing all detail. We've got the full Corel 8 graphics
> tool set, plus we can acquire other tools if necessary.
>
> Can any offer tips or tricks as to how to capture, manipulate and reduce
> screen captures as small as possible for viewing online? Can anyone
> successfully reduce captures much below 85%?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Larry
> Larry Hoffenberg
> Technical Writing Consultant
>
> TechWriter -at- att -dot- net
>
>

--
_________________________________
Tom Herme
mailto://hermet -at- dninevada -dot- com


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