Screen-Capture Keystrokes

 If you are interested in printing (or creating montages for display onLine), you may  be interested in creating screenshots - printable illustrations of the Mac screen. Screenshots are a staple of articles, tutorials, and books about the Mac.

The Mac offers an enormous number of different ways to create screenshots ofwhat you see on the screen. All of them involve pressing the Cmd and Shift keys.

Here's the rundown:

 Press Cmd-Shift-3 to create a picture file on your hard drive, in the PICT graphics format, that depicts the entire screen image. A satisfying camera-shutter sound tells you that you were successful. (The file is called Picture 1. Each time you press Cmd-Shift-3, you get another file, called Picture 2, Picture 3, and so on.) You can open this file into SimpleText, Photoshop, AppleWorks, or another graphics program, in readiness for editing or printing.

Press Cmd-Shift-4 to turn your cursor into a tiny + symbol. Now drag diagonally across the screen to capture only a square chunk of it. When you release the mouse, you hear the camera-click sound, and a Picture 1 file appears on your hard drive.

Add Caps Lock to the Cmd-Shift-4 keystroke to turn your cursor into a bullseye symbol. Now you can capture only one window or dialog box - after you click inside it. This trick saves you the trouble of cropping out unnecessary background details in your graphics program

Add Control to either of those keystrokes if you want the resulting image to be copied onto your Clipboard, ready for pasting into (for example) Photoshop or AppleWorks, instead of creating a PICT file on your hard drive.

You can even capture a menu using these keystrokes if you first open the menu by clicking its name (You can't capture a menu if you've dragged down it with the mouse button pressed.)

Of course, if you're really serious about capturing screenshots, opt instead for a more powerful add-on program like Snapz Pro, which can capture virtually anything on the screen and save it into your choice of graphics format.