I experience frequent situations in which I must capture part of the screen for use in a document or presentation. I knew what to do in the old days (OS 9 on the Mac). Command-shift-4 would allow me to select the part of the screen I wanted and save the selected area as a PICT file on the hard drive. Now I use XP and OS X and things aren’t so easy.
As far as I know, XP allows only Alt-printscreen. This captures the entire screen and allows this stored image to be pasted into an application (Paint) for editing. The clipping has to occur in the “paint” application. I know there are products that offer options, but nothing that is built in.
OS X is not much better. Command-Shift-4 – will save a selected area, but the file is PDF. What am I supposed to do with PDF files. Command-shift-control-4 (definitely a two hand move) saves the selected area to memory and a second application (e.g., Preview) can be used to save the contents of memory as a desired file type. OS X does come with the “Grab” utility. Command-shift-A and an area of the screen can be saved as a TIFF. Again, I have to open a paint program to save as PICT or JPG. I still like the old OS 9 system the best.
Looking for good utilities ……
