Screenshots

From Pirates@Home

When you want to share an image on your computer screen with someone else you can make a screenshot of either a particular window or the entire screen. The methods for doing this are slightly different on Windows, Apple, and Linux computers.

Once you have captured your screenshot you then have to decide how you will make it available to others. For a wiki like this you can upload the image to the server. For a discussion forum you could upload the image to hosting sites such as photobucket or flickr and then link to them.

Contents 1 Saving a Screenshot 1.1 Windows 1.2 MacOS X 1.3 Linux 1.3.1 Classic X 1.3.2 KDE 1.3.3 Gnome 2 Linking to the Image 3 Animated Images and Movies 4 References

Saving a Screenshot

The way you save a screenshot depends upon what kind of computer you are using:

Windows

1. Press Print Screen (PrtScn) Key to copy current screen display to the Clipboard.
   • or press Alt and Print Screen (PrtScn) Keys together to copy current active window to the Clipboard.
2. Open Microsoft® Paint (or your prefered graphics editor) and select Edit --> Paste.
3. Cut and paste again the section you want, or save the entire shot in whatever format the program allows.

MacOS X

On A Mac there is a utility program called 'Grab' which lets you take a snapshot of a particular window, the whole screen, or a selected rectangle on the screen. You will find it in the Utilities sub-folder of the Applications folder.

Once Grab is running, pull down the "Capture" menu and select the type of capture you want (window, screen, or selection). A dialog box will guide you to selecting what you want to save.

The image you have captured is not saved until you use File->Save or Save As.

The image is saved in TIFF format, which is not as useful as other formats. You can change the image to something else (like PNG, GIF, or JPEG) by opening the file you saved (the TIFF version) using Preview, and then using the "Save As" menu to save the image in another format.

Linux

On any computer running the X11 window system, which includes Linux and most other versions of Unix, you can use the xwd program to "dump" an image of an X11 window. (xwd is presumably short for "X window dump"). You can read more about this utility by giving the command man xwd.

There are various ways to use xwd depending on which desktop environment you use (if you use any at all)

Classic X

Using X11 without a desktop environment such as Gnome or KDE has come to be called "Classic" X. To use xwd you can either give a command on the command line or arrange for the command to be run from a menu item in your window manager.

KDE

I don't use KDE, so someone else will have to fill this bit in

Gnome

I don't use KDE, so someone else will have to fill this bit in

Linking to the Image

Animated Images and Movies

References