Re: printing process for screen shots

[Chuck Martin <techwriter -at- VNET -dot- IBM -dot- COM>]

You will get better quality from a higher resolution printer. Most
Imagesetters (?) used for publishing are in the range of 2400 DPI, which
can handle the 75 DPI range of your screen quite nicely.

The reason your 300 DPI laser can't do as well is because it is only
4x the resolution of your screen. I other words, for every pixel in
your screen capture, the laser printer has just 16 dots to work with
(a 4 x 4 grid), dots that, unlike offset printers, can be just turned
on and off. (Although, to be fair, printers such as the HP4 series
can vary the size of the dots to a limited extent.)

A 16-color display uses three 3-bit color scales to make its 16
colors. A 256 color display uses three 8-bit scales. As the color
depth goes up, representing those colors on a monochrome scale starts
to become problematic at lower resolutions.

Here at IBM, we use the standard monochrome color scheme. (Is that an
oxymoron?) It has the added benefit of, as you are capturing screens,
you'll see how the program looks, and if there are and problems, they
will also be there for customers. At a previous job, where I documented
Windows applications, we used the Windows default color scheme, which
was black, grays, blues, and white, a color scheme which looked good
in a monochrome scale.

For Windows, I have also used a shareware program called SnagIt, which is

easy to use and has a useful variety of options.

Chuck Martin
Information Developer, IBM
techwriter -at- vnet -dot- ibm -dot- com