[X4U] OT: Windows XP Print Screen

[Stroller]

On 25 Sep 2006, at 23:55, John Richardson wrote:
> ...
> Perhaps I actually did take a shot. Tried to paste into wordpad.  
> Print Scrn
> followed by Ctrl-V on a real PC pastes the screen shot into wordpad.

Ctrl-v has always seemed to work exactly as I expected when running  
Windows on my Mac book, so I'm guessing that you haven't taken a  
screenshot (ie: the Mac keyboard's f14 isn't mapped to Window's  
PrntScrn)

I can't immediately illuminate further onto this - I just posted to  
say that pasting the screenshot into Wordpad (or Word for that  
matter) is hideously inefficient, and I detest (dealing with) people  
who do that. Please desist at once!!

Wordpad (and Word) are programs for editing & formatting text, and  
pictures aren't their main purpose. Sure, when you paste an image  
into them it works, but you have no control over the image, nor do  
the people to whom you're sending it, and one has no idea what format  
the image is stored as. I find it quite annoying when someone emails  
me a screenshot as a massive great .doc file because I then have to  
wait for Word to open and then rescale the view of the "paper" so  
that I can actually see the details of the (often blurry screen).

Every Windows PC is shipped with a copy of Paint and, although this  
is fairly primitive, it is intended for graphics - when you paste the  
screenshot into Paint you then get the choice of saving as a bitmap,  
gif, jpeg or whatever. If you attach a real image file-format to an  
email it is, of course, displayed inline by any modern GUI mail  
client, and this saves the recipient much clicking when they come to  
view the file. A gif or jpeg is also much smaller than the same file  
wrapped in a .doc wrapper.

Just in case you don't knowt, alt-PrntScrn in Windows copies only the  
currently active window to the clipboard, which is often more  
efficient than sending a screenshot that shows much irrelevant  
desktop. If you find that the "canvas" in Paint is much larger than  
your screenshots, and that consequently you get white borders around  
the edges when you save the file, you can go into Paint's "File" menu  
and choose "New"; this will ask you the size of the canvas you want  
and I set it to 5 pixels by 5 pixels; close Paint and decline the  
option to save any changes; in the future when you open Paint it will  
start with a tiny 5pixel square canvas - just paste the screenshot in  
and the canvas will enlarge to accommodate it exactly. I mention this  
because at one time Paint didn't have a cropping feature.

Stroller.