OT screen capture from windows

Hi all, just writing a user guide for firmware uploading. It would be great to just include some screen shots, (rather than a bunch of words.) Is there some button (or such) that I can push from windows and have it save the screen image?

TIA George H.

Reply to
George Herold
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Oh windows XP.

Geo

Reply to
George Herold

I use a freebie called "Greenshot"...

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

The PrintScreen button still works in Windows.

And will allow you to paste into any imaging app. You can even paste directly into Word or Excel but that way lies madness - it will turn it into some horrendous vastly oversized Mickeysoft image format.

I suggest saving them in PNG format as a restricted palette of 256 for final use. Otherwise the documents tend to end up rather big.

IrfanView is as good as anything for this and the price is hard to beat.

You can get cuter ones that allow you to save just the contents of a single window on demand which may be more helpful to you.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

PrintScreen

Reply to
Rob

Never mind I found it online. (sorry I should have gone to google first.)

George H

Reply to
George Herold

Alt/printscreen nabs the active window, not the whole screen.

Open Irfanview, paste, crop, tweak/resample if desired, save as anything.

Reply to
John Larkin

Right Thanks Martin, (and others.. JT, Rob, JL) I'l just drop them into paint... which is crippled, but I can deal with it.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Greenshot offers region, window or full screen, plus some image manipulations, and it's free ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Greenshot is complicated and sometimes causes problems when inexperienced users open it accidentally.

Maybe the PrintScreen + Irfanview combo is better suited for the casual user.

Reply to
Rob

Is that an attempt at humor ?>:-}

Greenshot is so trivial to use even _I_ can manage it ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

A year or two ago we switched from Printkey to Greenshot at work and since then it has happened quite some times that users are "stuck" and it turns out that they have accidentally activated Greenshot (e.g. by clicking on its tray icon) and it is waiting for a screen grab area to be selected.

Unfortunately that mode does not end in an intuitive way.

Also, when activating Greenshot a quite long menu is shown that intimidates some of the users. I should add that most of the users are computer illiterates and are accustomed to everything being automatically done and configured. Most of them don't know how to do things like setting a default printer.

Reply to
Rob

Aha! The typical recent American college graduate >:-}

I think George Herold can manage it. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

I got my own I wrote "Stealit.exe" at my site.

It basically snaps the whole screen and allows you to crop what you need and save it as a image file.

It's interesting to note that just about any EXE file you put into google that is known, generates all these sites that claim that file is an infection.. I just can't see how these sites get away with crap like that.

Fool in every corner.

Jamie

Reply to
M Philbrook

You already heard about the Print Screen key. This doesn't help you immediately, but in Vista and later, Microsoft includes a thing called "Snipping Tool" that also takes screenshots; it has a little bit of built-in editing so you may not always have to go through Paint, etc.

formatting link

Some other tips:

Try not to scale the screenshot (like, inside Word) after you take it. This always makes it fuzzy. Often what you will end up with is a few pages of manual that have one screen shot and a few sentences of text each.

On later Windows (7 for sure, Vista I think), by default the window title is semi-transparent. This means that if the window is over something else on the screen, you'll get a fuzzy version of that to the right of the window title in your screenshot. At best this looks bad and at worst it might expose data you'd rather not expose.

IIRC you can go in and turn off the transparency; it might be in a non- obvious place, like the adaptive settings for screen readers, huge fonts, etc. The quick way to get rid of it is to set your desktop wallpaper to a single solid color and make sure the window you're capturing is not on top of anything else.

The stock Windows tools don't seem to deal with the case where you need to open a menu or something before you take the screenshot. The third- party tools probably have a "delay" option, which allows you to start the timer, open the menu or whatever, and then have the screen shot happen with the menu open.

For advanced trouble, sometimes you want to edit the screenshot after you take it. For instance, it has "C:\users\gherold\firmware.bin" , and you'd rather it say "C:\users\example\firmware.bin". If you dig through the Windows fonts list long enough, you can find the system font, and use that in your favorite image editing program. Sometimes it's faster to open another application which has a text box you can freely control, type in what you want (even if it doesn't make any sense in that application), screenshot that, and cut and paste.

On Linux with X, I use import, which is part of ImageMagick. This is available for all popular distributions.

import screenshot1.png

will change your cursor into a different shape; you put it over the window you want and left-click (button 1), and that window gets saved to screenshot1.png. "import -screen" and left-clicking outside of any window saves the entire screen. If I need to open a menu or switch desktops or something, "sleep 5; import screenshot.png" works.

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds

Ok but that is like having Irfanview running in the taskbar, pressing PrintScreen when you want to snap a screen, then raise Irfanview and Paste.

There are several categories of those sites. Not only for filenames, but also for TCP and UDP port numbers. Search for "tcp port (somenumber)" and you get an endless list of sites that when you visit them present some boilerplate text with no information at all about that specific port, only general remarks about what a port is.

Or search for an IP address and you get sites that just have put all possible IP addresses on automatically generated pages, without any specific information like if that address has been associated with hacking or spamming, if it is a server or some home connection, etc. In the past such sites existed and probably they still do, but in search results they are overwhelmed by useless crap sites.

Similar for programs, you are right. Just some text that says it is a program and that it may be dangerous to run programs you don't trust, or even more dangerous to remove programs of which you don't know the purpose. Useless.

Reply to
Rob

And it makes some program icons hard to see. It took me forever to find the "undo" in Word, because it was buried in the new-new-Imitate-Apple look, with zero contrast.

Right-click somewhere on the desktop, personalize, select Windows Classic.

The keyboard printscreen key works fine.

Reply to
John Larkin

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