Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

14.10. Screen-Capture keystrokes

If you're reading a chapter about printing and graphics, you may someday be interested in creating screenshots ”printable illustrations of the Mac screen.

Screenshots are a staple of articles, tutorials, and books about the Mac (including this one). Mac OS X has a secret built-in feature that lets you make them ”and includes some very cool convenience features.

Here's how to capture:

• The whole screen . Press Shift-c-3 to create a picture file on your desktop, in PNG format, that depicts the entire screen image. A satisfying camera-shutter sound tells you that you were successful.

  The file is called Picture 1.png . Each time you press Shift-c-3, you get another file, called Picture 2, Picture 3, and so on. You can open these files into Preview or any other graphics program, in readiness for editing, printing, or exporting in a different format.

• One section of the screen . You can capture only a rectangular region of the screen by pressing Shift-c-4. See Figure 14-13 for the details.

• One menu, window, icon (with its name ), or dialog box . Once you've got your menu or window open onscreen, or the icon visible (even if it's in the Dock), press Shift-c-4. But instead of dragging diagonally, press the Space bar.

  Now your cursor turns into a tiny camera (Figure 14-13, bottom). Move it so that the misty highlighting fills the window or menu you want to capture ”and then click. The resulting Picture file snips the window or menu neatly from its background.

• The Dock . That business of pressing Shift-c-4 and then the Space bar also lets you capture the Dock in one quick snip. Once you've got the camera cursor, just click any blank spot in the Dock (between icons).

As noted in Chapter 10, by the way, Mac OS X also offers another way to create screenshots: the Grab program, which offers a timer option that lets you set up the screen before it takes the shot. But if you're really serious about capturing screenshots, you should opt instead for Snapz Pro X(www.ambrosiasw.com), which can capture virtually anything on the screen ”even movies of onscreen procedures, along with your narration ”and save it in your choice of graphics format.