awatibi01: High resolution screen captures

Thursday, 5 May 2011

High resolution screen captures

Sometimes I want to get a higher resolution screen capture so I can include it in a printed document. Although my monitors are big, if I stretch a window out very large, that doesn't make the text, buttons, or menus bigger. This hint tells you how to scale the window itself, so you get a better screen capture.

Here's the problem: I want a screen capture with as many real, useful pixels in it as possible. If I have a window, say the Eclipse IDE, that looks good when it's, for example, 1000x800 pixels in size, it tends to just fill up with white space if I stretch it out to 1600x1050 (the size of my monitor). Certainly the icons and such don't scale.

If I take a screen capture of the 1000x800 pixel window, and then I scale it using a raster graphics program, the text gets scaled and jaggy, along with the UI elements. For many programs I find it time consuming and annoying to try to change all the fonts and preferences to make the text larger, and even if I do, the U ...