TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Bakker said:
>> Can anyone suggest a good screen capture utility to run on the
>> AS/400, such that we can reproduce AS/400 screens in paper manuals
>> in Word or FrameMaker?
Beth Friedman said:
> Oddly enough, I've been working with the exact same problem. We came
> up with two different approaches. The first is to do a true screen
> capture. We used PaintShop Pro to do this, then I imported the
> screen
> into PSP and reduced the color depth to 16 colors, making the file
> much smaller. I also experimented with forcing the screen shot to
> black and white, thus increasing readability.
I also used PSP, though I always reduced the color depth to 2 colors
(black and white) and saved the shot as a WMF. I used the PSP "Magic
Wand" tool to select the graphic and crop out the emulator window.
Worked great. I could capture a metafile image and save it to disk in
about 5 seconds (using the trusty old Windows Recorder).
> The second approach was to copy the screen text into the clipboard (we
> could do this via Client Access or Rumba -- I expect any Windows
> front-end can do this), pasting it into Word, and using styles to
> change the font and put a border around the text. Despite the fact
> that underlines (with no text) have to be redone and bold face is lost,
> this is the approach that we have chosen to use. When I changed all of
> the graphics in a 30-page document from screen shots to actual text,
> the file size went from 1.75 meg to 250K. And I think the readability
> improved considerably.
This approach has several drawbacks. First, drawing in those underlines
can take a long time. Second, with all those horrid abbreviations
typically used on AS/400 screens, it takes 2 to 3 times longer to run a
full document spell-check. However, Beth is correct about the file size
and readability.
Scott Esbrook
Compuware Corporation
TECHWR-L (Technical Communication) List Information: To send a message
to 2500+ readers, e-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot- Send commands
to LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU (e.g. HELP or SIGNOFF TECHWR-L).
Search the archives at http://www.documentation.com/ or search and
browse the archives at http://listserv.okstate.edu/archives/techwr-l.html
