A screen capture, or screenshot is an image taken to record the visible items displayed on the monitor or another visual output device. It is often used in documentation and user guides to instruct how to use software to accomplish specific purposes.
#31845
How do you best assist users whose learning styles are more visual than verbal? Tietjen discusses the benefits and the how-to of screencasting, a mixture of visuals, audio, and complementary text.
Tietjen, Phil. Intercom (2008). Articles>Documentation>Multimedia>Screen Captures
#14416
Balancing Act: Keeping Your Screen Movies Small and Beautiful 
Screen recordings are a valuable tool for enhancing training, tutorials, manuals and websites. Companies use this technique to produce streaming and downloadable content. The recording tools are readily available and affordable. In this article, we explore some techniques, tips and tricks for recording sound, mouse movement and happenings from your screen to an AVI file. We will talk in both general terms and use specific examples. The examples pertain to HyperCam, a downloadable screen recording application from Hyperionics Technology. Like most screen recording applications, HyperCam captures the action from your Windows screen -- including cursor movements and sound -- and saves it to an AVI movie file.
Rice, William H. IV. WilliamRice.com (2002). Design>Documentation>Multimedia>Screen Captures
#18648
The Battle of the Screen Capture Programs
I spent a little time exploring two screen-capture software packages and found out that on the surface, they're a lot alike. Both programs offer the garden variety of formats for saving screen captures (BMP, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and TGA), and in both cases special tools for optimizing output are available. For example, when saving an image as a bitmap (BMP) using either program you can select a bit depth anywhere between one and 32.
Caldwell, Karla. STC Northeast Ohio (2001). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Screen Captures
#10869
Most tech writers have their favorite software for capturing and processing static screen shots. I won’t compare these applications or try to tell you how to use them. Instead, I’ll give you techniques that help you produce the best possible screen shots, no matter what application you choose. This article assumes that you’ve taken screen shots before. It uses terms like “hot keys” and “time delay” and “capture cursor.” If you don’t know what these terms mean, look them up in the help for your screen capture software. They represent standard features that are found in most screen capture applications.
Rice, William H. IV. Williamrice.com. Design>Graphic Design>Online>Screen Captures
#13566
Brokedown Palace, Part 1: Why User Guides Don't Work
Software user guides use up an awful lot of space with screen shots. But I know what the screen looks like -- it's right in front of me. Any decent GUI design is self-documenting to some extent, at least. No matter how much we complain about them, GUIs have gotten pretty good. Children have them figured out in minutes. And then they start asking questions like, 'How do I make my stick man move around?' Computers are toasters or drawing pads to them. That's another reason user guides don't work: the average user doesn't need one anymore.
Knowles, Michael. Write Thinking (2002). Articles>Writing>Documentation>Screen Captures
#32045
Camtasia Studio or Captivate: A Comparison
I have spent the last two weeks switching between Captivate and Camtasia Studio. Talk about schizophrenic. I spent a lot of time trying to remember which command I had to use in which program, but overall it’s been an interesting experience.
Technical Writer (2008). Articles>Multimedia>Video>Screen Captures
#15104
Creating Documentation that Shows 
Advocates using screen shots, text balloons, arrows, and scannable text to create picture-like documentation.
Eaton, Janet M.F. Intercom (2000). Design>Documentation>Technical Illustration>Screen Captures
#24160
Empirical Proof for Presenting Screen Captures in Software Documentation 
None of the previous studies on screen captures addressed the functions in the framework. There was no empirical research on any of the four functions of screen captures. This article presents our research on these functions. Each section starts with a brief explanation of the function. Next, we illustrate the screen capture designs used to test the function. The remainder of each section explains the setup and results of the empirical study. The article ends with some general conclusions about the functions of screen captures.
Gellevij, Mark and Hans Van Der Meij. Technical Communication Online (2004). Articles>Documentation>Graphic Design>Screen Captures
#21854
The elusive screen, captured at last.
Kvern, Olav Martin. Adobe Magazine (1998). Design>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Screen Captures
#31768
How To Capture a Screen Shot of your Desktop or the Active Window in Windows
Have you ever pressed the PrtScn (print screen) key on your Windows keyboard and wondered why it was there since it never seemed to do anything? Well, it does do something! It copies an image of your screen onto the "clipboard," ready to paste into any graphics program. These steps show you how to use it along with Windows' standard image editor, Microsoft Paint, to save an image of your screen.
Chastain, Sue. About.com (2005). Articles>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Screen Captures
#27644
Review: Review of Screen Capture Tools
Describes the important attributes of a capture tool and examines and compares the features of five popular products.
Ellison, Matthew. WritersUA (2005). Articles>Reviews>Software>Screen Captures
#19670
Screen Capture Software: Better than Print Screen
Everyone knows that detailed pictures are a necessary supplement for technical documentation. For those who create software manuals, this means screen captures—images of what users see as they look at the monitor.
Wardin, Carla. Intercom (2003). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Screen Captures
#29885
An introduction to generating screen captures from Microsoft Windows computers. Consider your deliverables; where is the screen capture going to be used and seen by the customer? This helps you determine how you need to create your screen capture.
Brierley, Sean. TECHWR-L (2002). Books>Documentation>Technical Illustration>Screen Captures
#14144
This document is about making screen captures for technical writers working primarily in a Microsoft Windows environment. The tools targeted include Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, along with Techsmith’s SnagIt, Adobe Photoshop, and Ulead’s PhotoImpact 4.2. Certainly, the thoughts and techniques mentioned herein can be applied to other professions, other operating systems, and other tools.
Brierley, Sean. TECHWR-L. Books>Documentation>Image Editing>Screen Captures
#10363
Screen Captures in Software Documentation
While screen captures are the most widely used illustrations in manuals, there is almost no literature on their role and design. In this paper we draw together practice, theory and empirical research to advance a taxonomy that identifies these roles and designs. We suggest that screen captures in software documentation can help the user to switch attention, develop a mental model of the program, verify screen states, and identify and locate window elements and objects. Four important design areas (coverage, positioning, size, and cueing) are distinguished and empirical findings discussed. Research has substantiated the claim that screen captures speed up task completion, but others have yet to be proven. We believe that a more refined approach, afforded by the taxonomy, is likely to improve practice and research, and yield strong evidence supporting the use of screen captures in software documentation.
van der Meij, Hans and Mark Gellevij. Technical Communication Online (1998). Articles>Software>Documentation>Screen Captures
#13759
Screen Captures to Support Switching Attention
This study set out to validate the supportive role of screen captures for switching attention. Forty-two participants learned how to work with Microsoft Excel with a paper manual. There were three types of manuals: a textual manual, a visual manual with full-screen captures, and a visual manual with a mixture of partial- and full-screen captures. The findings show that participants in all conditions looked up from the manual to the screen on about 97% of the cases in which such a switch was called for. Rank order analyses showed that users of the visual manuals switched attention significantly more often than did users of the textual manual. No differences were found between conditions on learning effects and training time.
Gellevij, Mark and Hans Van Der Meij. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2002). Design>Graphic Design>Documentation>Screen Captures
#31082
Screencasting: the Future of Technical Communication?
Screencasting has numerous advantages for software training: the added realism of the screen versus paper-based or static online screens, ease of use, and low cost. Archee reviews two popular programs.
Archee, Raymond K. Intercom (2008). Articles>TC>Video>Screen Captures
#23492
Screenshots with the Mouse Pointer
How to produce screenshots which include the mouse-pointer.
Springer, Hans. TC-FORUM (1999). Articles>Graphic Design>Documentation>Screen Captures
#15201
Taking a Second Look at Screen Captures
Asserts that screen captures aren't as necessary and helpful as many writers of documentation might think.
Bright, Kathy. Intercom (2001). Design>Documentation>Graphic Design>Screen Captures
#32262
In a continuation of a previous introductory article about screencasting, Archee continues the discussion by delving deeper into the history, benefits, usefulness, and future of this powerful technical communication tool.
Archee, Raymond K. Intercom (2008). Articles>Documentation>Video>Screen Captures
#32537
CamStudio is a free and open-source software package for Microsoft Windows that is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
#33699
A Five-Click Solution to Publishing and Uploading Screen Videos to SharePoint
The quickest video solution for uploading Jing videos to a SharePoint directory. This process requires a few minutes of setup, but once you set it up, it literally takes just five clicks to initiate, capture, and publish a video to SharePoint.
Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Content Management>Multimedia>Screen Captures
#33849
So, You Want To Screen Capture, Huh?
Here's a quick tutorial about screen captures, thus the title. If you're not sure what a screen capture is, then think about the pages you've seen lately. Maybe some of them have had specific sections of the desktop or a program made into an image. It was almost as if they captured part of the screen as an image.
Burns, Joe. HTML Goodies (2004). Articles>Documentation>Graphic Design>Screen Captures
#34019
Four Ideas to Organize Your Technical Document Images and Screen Shots
Most technical writers would include at least a few images to illustrate a point, or screen shots that accompany the description of a certain step-by-step procedure, etc. Organizing such images can really become a problem, especially when you have dozens and hundreds of them. Finding, editing, and importing them can quickly become a logistical nightmare, especially when a technical writer is working under a deadline pressure. Here are four ideas to organize and name your images for higher productivity.
Akinci, Ugur. Technical Communication Center (2009). Articles>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Screen Captures
#34551
Technical Communication in the 4th Dimension
A discussion of how to plan for the use of time in video documentation projects.
Miller, Harry. Microsoft (2009). Articles>Documentation>Video>Screen Captures
