Grabbing The Screen with Ksnapshot LG #98

...making Linux just a little more fun!

Grabbing The Screen with Ksnapshot
By Hal Stanton

Grabbing The Screen with Ksnapshot

I'm a KDE user. When I decided to give Linux a try, I felt KDE was the most like what I was used to using. Using KDE has not been hard for me but there are many things I have done over the years that I have to learn again. One of those is doing a screen capture. I am beginning to think the hardest part of using Linux is deciding which program to use. There are so many choices.

I needed an easy way to capture screens. I looked at various programs and decided to use Ksnapshot. Ksnapshot is amazingly easy to use and offers all the options I need. I am going to describe how to use it but, knowing it is there to be used is probably the most important part of this article.

I found Ksnapshot in the Utilities->Desktop menu of KDE. It can also be started by pressing Alt-F2 to display a Run Box and entering ksnapshot in the box. I suppose if you use it a lot you could add it as a desktop icon.

When you start Ksnapshot it grabs an image of your whole desktop before it displays itself. If this is what you wanted then all you have to do is select Print or Save. Many times you will want to grab a snapshot of a particular window on the desktop. This is easily accomplished by setting the Snapshot delay option to a few seconds and selecting the "Only grab the window containing the pointer" option. Then, click the New Snapshot button, move the mouse pointer to the window you want to capture and wait until the mouse pointer blinks.

If you elect to save the snapshot, you are offered format choices. Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), JPEG and PNG are the most portable between systems but you are also offered two Windows formats (icon and BMP), two X formats (X BitMap Image and X PixMap Image) and a few others.

When you print or save the snapshot, the dialog boxes are the standard you will expect to see with a KDE application. Once you are familiar with these and other standard dialogs (opening a file is another example) KDE applications become very easy to learn.

In my last article about making photo galleries I asked a question and received an answer. (Thanks Willy.) This time I have a more general question. Is there a place to find a summary of how to do these types of common tasks using KDE? I feel having this information would make it a lot easier for people to move to Linux.

Hal Stanton was a Windows user for too many years. Now he can honestly say that Linux is a lot more fun.

[BIO] None provided.