Tips for making good screen shots

Tips for making good screen shots

You can make a screen shot from ToonTalk by pressing control-F11 which adds a file named framexxxx.bmp (where xxxx is the frame number) to your ToonTalk directory (found at \My Documents\ToonTalk\<your name>). Control-F12 puts the screen shot on the Windows clipboard. (Alternatively you can let Windows do this and use the PrintScrn button.) Note that in some rare circumstances the colors will be incorrect when copying to the clipboard. This problem does not occur when copying the screen to a file.

To make the highest quality screen, we recommend you

run at the highest screen resolution your video card is capable (1600x1200 works well)
run at the highest color depth your video card is capable (24-bit or 32-bit works best)
choose an appropriate user name (if the main notebook will be visible in the screen shot)
add "-adjustable_sizes 0" to the command line if you want the hand and tools to be full size (note this works best with new user names)
consider choosing fonts that are best for your purposes

If your goal is to get a screen shot of some object, then we recommend you place the object on a screen-sized rectangle of a color that does not occur in the object you want to capture. Making it larger than what Pumpy considers a "good" size will not improve the quality of the image unless the image includes text which will scale.

You can make a sequence of screen shots by holding down control-F11. The overhead of creating the snapshots will make the sequence very jerky if turned into a video or animation. You can avoid this by making a demo first and then holding down control-F11 while the demo is playing. There are many free or commercial tools that can transform a sequence of still images into a video format.