Screen capture sub-menus

[Martin Wynne]

Hi,

I'm trying to capture a menu with a sub-menu showing. It seems
that Impict can capture one or the other, but not both together as
a non-rectangular image.

So I'm manually pasting the sub-menu over the main menu, but
this needs to be done to pixel-precision vertically because there is
a little bit of the sub-menu showing in the margin of the main menu.

Am I doing this right, or is there an automatic way of aligning
two bitmaps for such purposes? Or of capturing the whole thing
in one go?

Thanks for any help,

Martin.

[Tim Green]

The answer to your question is a combination of yes and no. There is a trick for capturing some types of drop-down menus within screenshots, this is described in Step-by-Step Procedures / More Advanced Tasks / Expanded Detail Shots in the Impict Help.

However, the screen capture utility used in H&M and Impict and the more advanced version in TNT cannot capture both a dropped-down menu and its opened submenu. This is because it focuses on objects, and both the menu and its submenu are separate objects.

As you've discovered, capturing and pasting the individual menu components is a bit fiddly, although if you capture them as objects ('Window, Control or Menu')and use the cursor keys in Impict you can actually align them quite accurately.

This is the sort of task for which I use the capture utility in Paint Shop Pro. What I do is set it to capture on a hot key (I use F11) and capture the entire application window or the whole Windows desktop with the menus in the state that I want -- PSP is very good at this. Then I display the results in Paint Shop Pro and use the Impict or TNT capture utility to capture the portion of it that I want, after which I tidy the results up in Impict.

[jgodfrey]

I'm trying to capture a menu with a sub-menu showing. It seems that Impict can capture one or the other, but not both together as a non-rectangular image.

When you say, "capture as a non-rectangular image" is that to say that you don't want the application in the background of the bounding box of the captured image? If that's the case, I don't know how to do that. If that's not the case, and you just need to capture an image with an menu and a submenu open, you can do it using the "fixed sized region" setting. Just set it to something obviously larger than you need. Open the menu's with your mouse (the fixed region is centered around the mouse). Then, just control-click to capture the entire region. Now, back in Impict, just crop the image as necessary.

this needs to be done to pixel-precision vertically because there is a little bit of the sub-menu showing in the margin of the main menu.

I assume you know that you can move an image a pixel-at-a-time using the arrow keys? Just increase the image magnification, then adjust it using the arrow keys. It should be easy to place it accurately.

Jeff