DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- MAY 2013
SCREEN CAPTURE PROGRAMS
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DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2013-05
SCREEN CAPTURE PROGRAMS
©2014 Donald R. Snow
My Freeware Corner Notes are
printed in our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group monthly
newsletter TAGGology and posted on my Family History Class Notes
webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
, sometimes with updated information there.
SCREEN CAPTURE PROGRAMS
This month I'll describe two free screen capture programs. These can
be used to copy and/or print anything that you can see on the computer
screen, e.g. photographs, census records, tables on websites, scrolling
files in windows, pedigree charts, family groups, etc.
1. FASTSTONE CAPTURE 5.3
Version 5.3 of FastStone Capture was the last freeware version and later
versions are shareware, which isn't very expensive, but the free version
does everything I usually need. The free version is available from
several websites, e.g. http://www.oldapps.com/fast_stone_capture.php?old_fscapture=17
and you can find other download sites by Googling "faststone capture
5.3". With it you can capture the full screen, active window,
rectangular section, free-hand section, and scrolling screens. This
last feature is one that I use a lot since many articles or webpages
continue on down off the screen and you have to scroll down to see them
all. Most other screen capture programs only do what you can see on
the screen without scrolling down. this program saves screenshots in
several formats including jpg, tif, png, and pdf. I've found that
saving scrolling windows in pdf format works best, since if I save them in
any other format, it saves them as tall skinny files that have to be
expanded to be read. Saving them as pdf's gives files with scroll
bars at the side so you can scroll through it like on the original.
Screenshots can be saved to the clipboard for pasting into an email or
document, saved as a file that you name, saved as a file that is
automatically named sequentially with the date and time, or sent directly
to a printer. I've found that printing things with FastStone Capture
directly to the printer frequently gives me better results than using the
print command in the program since you know exactly what the print will
look like and it can be done at full size. There are keyboard
shortcuts so you can tell FastStone Capture to save images without having
to use the mouse and you can set it to include or exclude the mouse cursor
in the capture. You can use it to do a sequence of screen captures
where it names the files automatically so you don't have to stop and name
the files yourself each time, or you can have it stop and ask you what to
name and where to save the file each time. Another helpful option is a
sound that plays when it does a capture, so you know it has done it. There
is an option to add captions to the images saved and you can have the
images opened automatically in FastStone Editor which comes with the
program. This Editor program allows editing the file, adding captions
later, and several other things. There is also an excellent freeware
image viewer, FastStone Image Viewer, available from the website http://www.faststone.org/ , but I
usually use the Photo and Fax Viewer in Windows or else Irfanview from http://www.irfanview.com/ .
There were some earlier versions of browsers that FastStone Capture 5.3
was incompatible with, but it seems to work with all browsers now.
It also works with some other programs where you can't print the reports
you want, but you can see them on screen. For example, in Ancestral
Quest, to do a screenshot of a family group, I saved it as pdf, and then
OCR'd it (Optical Character Recognition) with the free PDF-XChangeViewer
from http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer
, and then had a searchable family group sheet as a pdf. But not all
features of FastStone Capture seem to work on programs other than
browsers. I use FastStone Capture nearly every day and have tried
other screen capture programs, but keep coming back to this one since it
will save what I want in the format I want. It has both installed
and portable versions. The portable version allows you to use it on
a flashdrive at a FHC, for example, and you can save the captured images
to your flashdrive to take home.
2. SCREENHUNTER FREE
Occasionally I need to do a screenshot of something where I can't use
FastStone Capture, e.g. needing a picture of FastStone Capture in
operation for an article about using it. For this I use another
screen capture program and one that I have used extensively is
ScreenHunter Free from http://www.wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter.htm
. In fact, I used this program for several years before I discovered
FastStone Capture. This is only one of many screen capture programs that
work well. It is simple to use and gives good results, but doesn't
have the features that FastStone Capture has, unless you pay for the
commercial version. Various keystrokes will start the program to do
various types of screenshots, e.g. to capture a rectangular area or else
to capture the entire screen. This one also has the option of
producing a sound when it captures so you know it has finished. The
free version is a good and simple program without all the bells and
whistles that others have and I use it occasionally when I can't use
FastStone Capture.
These are two screen capture programs and both have many uses in family
history.
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