Making screenshots

Francois Gouget fgouget at free.fr
Wed Nov 13 00:19:28 CST 2002


On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:

> People,
>
> I've added a small section describing a few criteria for
> a good screenshot. Check it out at:
>
> http://www.dssd.ca/wine/Wine-0.9-TODO.html#screenshots

Let me just add a few recommendations:

 * you say big screenshots are bad which I mostly agree with. If a
standard size were to be decided upon I would rather vote for 1024x768
than for 800x600. However that's not my point here. My point is that one
should not take a screenshot of 1600x1200 and scale it to 800x600. This
makes the fonts unreadable as is shown by your last screenshot
(http://www.dssd.ca/wine/wine-ss-ok-small.png). Instead I would
recommend to start a VNC server or a second X session with the right
resolution and take a screenshot of that.

 * the second recommendation would be to make sure it shows nice fonts.
So install the fonts from http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/ and
make sure you have a FreeType library with hinting (or use CrossOver
Office ;-).

 * if you take the full desktop, then avoid fancy backgrounds. The best
would be to use the distribution's default look and feel to make it more
recongnizable.

Finally I'm not too hot on systematically taking a screenshot of a full
desktop. If the screenshot is to go in the application database then I
think taking just the application window is enough. We also need
screenshots of full desktops but not that many. In some cases a partial
desktop could be enough, especially if the application window is small
(CD players, Trillian, etc).

-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
     We are Pentium of Borg. You will be approximated. Division is futile.




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