Information Gift

ScreenGrabbed

It's often handy to screengrab, to take a picture of your screen, whether you need to reference an error message, capture an application's interface, or document a page layout problem.

Both Mac and Win platforms allow basic screengrabbing, but while Win OS offers two methods, both of which require the use of an additional application, Mac OS offers six, count 'em, six methods of grabbing entire screens or portions of screens, across displays, half of which save directly to disk without the need for an intermediate application.

The Printscreen button on Windows boxes let you place a bitmap copy of your screen, or, if you use Alt-Printscreen, the front-most window into your clipboard; from there you can paste into a graphics program like Microsoft® Paint to crop out just what you need and save to one format or another.

Macs have long had a bit more flexibility, including the above functionality and the ability to automatically save screengrabs to disk in a native Pict ("Classic Mac OS") or .pdf (OS X) format, and saving selections of the screen to disk or clipboard.

What follows is the sometimes byzantine key-combination required for each operation and the MacOS platforms supported:

Note that Classic Mac save-to-disk screengrabs save pict files on the root directory using a sequential naming convention: "Picture 1", "Picture 2", etc. On OS X, the pdf screen grabs follow the same naming convention but are instead saved to the desktop.

Workflow Tip:
While pdf is the native screen format in OS X, if you need to send screengrabs, your recipients may appreciate an easier to work with format. While it's easy enough to use the Control key modifier to push your grabs to the clipboard for pasting into an image-editing app, sometimes it's more convenient to grab and save screens to work with later.

Enter high-school senior Kevin Wojniak's DropJPEG, a wonderful freeware tool that's earned a coveted place in my dock and handily converts image files into jpeg files via drag and drop, including OS X PDF screengrabs, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PNG and more. Operation couldn't be much simpler, simply set the desired amount of compression, whether the original should be deleted, and whether or not to capitalize the extension, the latter two options are off by default.