Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Screen-Capture Keystrokes

If you’re reading a chapter about printing and graphics, you may someday be interested in creating screenshots—printable illustrations of the Mac screen.

Screenshots are a staple of articles, tutorials, and books about the Mac (including this one). Mac OS X has a secret built-in feature that lets you make them—and version 10.2 adds some very cool convenience features.

Here’s how to capture:

• The whole screen. Press Shift-

  

  -3 to create a picture file on your desktop, in PDF (Acrobat) format, that depicts the entire screen image. A satisfying camera-shutter sound tells you that you were successful.

  The file is called Picture 1 (or Picture 1.pdf., if you’ve chosen to reveal file name extensions as described in Section 4.3.3). Each time you press Shift-

  

  -3, you get another file, called Picture 2, Picture 3, and so on. You can open these files into Preview, AppleWorks, or another graphics program, in readiness for editing or printing.

• One section of the screen. As reflected in Figure 13-11, you can capture only a rectangular region of the screen by pressing Shift-

  

  -4. When you drag and release the mouse, you hear the camera-click sound, and the Picture 1 file appears on ...