Help request for large screen captures?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Mark Emson wonders: <<Do any you know a good method for capturing large
screen grabs... I am trying to capture an custom Excel table. It is very
large and runs off the screen in both X&Y directions.>>

Taking multiple shots and stitching them together is probably the best bet,
though it's lots of work. What might work better would be to create a custom
report in Excel that shows exactly the screen view you want, then print that
to disk as a PostScript file or distill it via Acrobat; that would retain
most of the resolution you need. The file's likely going to be huge, but you
can always convert it into a bitmap or other format later. You mentioned
that the custom buttons don't reproduce, but that's the easy part of the
problem to solve: simply do a screen capture of the buttons, and add them in
over the top of the rest of the final image in your favorite graphics
program.

<<The quality needs to be high/sharp because the images will be going to a
commercial printer for inclusion in a product brochure.>>

I suspect you have very different impressions than I do of what constitutes
a "brochure". <g> If the image is too large to show the whole thing legibly
in a single screen, how are you going to reproduce it on letter-size or
legal-size paper? Anything larger than that is a poster, in my books, not a
brochure. Asking for help creating a single large screenshot may actually be
asking us to solve the wrong problem; you might do far better (as I've done
in some brochures) by presenting a single scaled-down version of the screen
(to provide overall look and feel plus context, with illegible text) and
individual screenshots that highlight specific features I wanted to brag
about (each of these at legible size and better resolution).

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca 
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