Hit Cmd-Shift-4 and the pointer turns into a cross-hair. Select the area you want to screenshot by dragging the mouse. The screenshot is a PDF that ends up on your desktop!
Better still, press spacebar when the cursor is a cross hair then select the window you want to capture, and it screenshots just that window.
This is probably one of those things in my "Missing Manual" which I never got around to finishing ;-)
called Snapz which apple started to bundle in with Jaguar. You can get the Pro X version for a small upgrade price http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/. I've been using this for years. I *heart* AmbrosiaSW
Re:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
pjm on 2003-02-19T13:09:58
Really? I'm pretty sure the shortcuts that Matt described are built-ins rather than nabbed from Snapz (which is a great product by the way). I certainly don't have Snapz on my machine, but do have the shortcuts.
Oh yeah, screenshots can be command-line generated as well, though I'm not really sure what this offers you over the keyboard shortcuts: maybe scriptability (and aliasing capability). The control key action is worth knowing in any case.
~ % screencapture
usage: screencapture [-icmwsWx] [file] [cursor]
-i capture screen interactively, by selection or window
control key - causes screen shot to go to clipboard
space key - toggle between mouse selection and
window selection modes
escape key - cancels interactive screen shot
-c force screen capture to go to the clipboard
-m only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
-w only allow window selection mode
-s only allow mouse selection mode
-W start interaction in window selection mode
-x do not play sounds
file where to save the screen captureRe:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
hfb on 2003-02-19T14:17:21
hmm...I thought apple had started bundling Snapz since it came with my dual powermac last fall and that shortcut Matt mentioned is exactly like the snapz shortcut.
Re:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
ziggy on 2003-02-19T15:01:43
Cmd-shift-4 has always been screenshot of the selected area all the way back to the 680x0 Macs. Cmd-shift-3 has always been capture the entire screen, and Cmd-shift-[12] used to be eject the internal/external floppy, back when that made sense.Ambrosia's product patched the Mac traps to override the standard behavior and use their product instead. It may well come pre-installed with some recent mac models for some period of time. (My iBook didn't come with Quicken this summer, but my iMac did this fall.) All I can say is that I never got Snapz with my Macs.
The interesting and obvious difference with OS X is that the screen shot is a PDF file. It used to be a bitmap, and changed to a PICT file in some reasonably modern release of MacOS.
Re:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
hfb on 2003-02-19T15:52:20
Apple apparently bundles it only with the powermacs along with Omnigraffle and Omnioutliner. I've used snapz for so long I forgot the crap one that the old Mac OS had by default. Snapz will export the screenshots to PDF or jpeg or quicktime movies. It's a pity Apple didn't license snapz as part of the OS since it's so much more usable than the one that the os has.
Re:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
TorgoX on 2003-02-19T16:55:33
The interesting and obvious difference with OS X is that the screen shot is a PDF file. It used to be a bitmap, and changed to a PICT file in some reasonably modern release of MacOS.I just don't understand Apple's new love affair with PDF.
Re:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
Matts on 2003-02-19T17:59:47
Me either.
but if you hold down ctrl it goes to the clipboard which is better.Re:It's an AmbrosiaSW product
chromatic on 2003-02-19T18:22:22
She looks as good close up as she does far away (if a little fuzzier)?
PDF love
sbwoodside on 2003-02-20T07:10:02
Eh. It's a bitmap embedded in a PDF, so you can open it with bitmap apps (e.g. photoshop) and get what you want. PDF's a very flexible format.Re:PDF love
TorgoX on 2003-02-20T07:21:46
So why the PDF? Why not just generate a PNG instead?Re:PDF love
darobin on 2003-02-20T13:02:35
Because the entire interface is PDF. PDF has some excellent features for a high-level graphic interface. Just dumping some PDF is simple for them I guess.
Of course, they should have used SVG, but unfortunately the REC came out a little too late for them. However the model is almost exactly the same, and it's no coincidence.
Re:PDF love
TorgoX on 2003-02-20T18:30:29
Atomic flyswatter.Re:PDF love
darobin on 2003-02-20T18:38:09
Care to elaborate? (not on the saving of a snapshot but on using PDF for UI).
Re:It messes up with BBEdit
Matts on 2003-02-19T13:29:40
Don't use BBEdit. It really does suck;-) Re:It messes up with BBEdit
sbwoodside on 2003-02-20T07:08:47
So what do you use instead?! (and don't say emacs or vim...)Re:It messes up with BBEdit
Matts on 2003-02-20T08:24:14
I use Project Builder. It sucks too, but slightly less than BBEdit. I also use jEdit, which doesn't suck but is slow on my G3. I look forward to getting the G4 so I can switch to jEdit full time.Re:It messes up with BBEdit
pudge on 2003-02-27T03:32:45
If you think BBEdit sucks, you likely haven't used it much.Re:It messes up with BBEdit
blech on 2003-02-19T18:06:19
Maybe this is something odd to do with the AZERTY layout, but for me (UK QWERTY), command 4 will switch to the fourth window; I don't need shift.
Perhaps you could email Bare Bones support? They're usually responsive, even when it turns out to be a silly user error (like my expectation that C-w would work the same in Emacs mode as it does in the shell; it doesn't, and hence it does a different thing in BBEdit too). The address is support [at] barebones.com.
That's right, Entourage doesn't have any print functionality that prints a calendar like I see on the screen, which is EXACTLY the format I want on paper to go on my bulletin board.
