On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
People,
I've added a small section describing a few criteria for a good screenshot. Check it out at:
Let me just add a few recommendations:
* you say big screenshots are bad which I mostly agree with. If a standard size were to be decided upon I would rather vote for 1024x768 than for 800x600. However that's not my point here. My point is that one should not take a screenshot of 1600x1200 and scale it to 800x600. This makes the fonts unreadable as is shown by your last screenshot (http://www.dssd.ca/wine/wine-ss-ok-small.png). Instead I would recommend to start a VNC server or a second X session with the right resolution and take a screenshot of that.
* the second recommendation would be to make sure it shows nice fonts. So install the fonts from http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/ and make sure you have a FreeType library with hinting (or use CrossOver Office ;-).
* if you take the full desktop, then avoid fancy backgrounds. The best would be to use the distribution's default look and feel to make it more recongnizable.
Finally I'm not too hot on systematically taking a screenshot of a full desktop. If the screenshot is to go in the application database then I think taking just the application window is enough. We also need screenshots of full desktops but not that many. In some cases a partial desktop could be enough, especially if the application window is small (CD players, Trillian, etc).