General ⇒ Best way to deal with screenshots?

[benowar]

Hi,

I was wondering what the best way would be to handle screen-shots in latex. That is, graphics that are not vectorized and thereby don't scale well when you resize them.

First of all, whats the recommended size of a screenshot so that it nicely fits in a normal A4 page? Ideally it would be small enough so that I dont have to explicitly set the width and so that it would not be scaled at all. But that does not seem possible (a small screenshot with 500 pixels was already more than twice as big as the width of the page).

Second, is there a rule of thumb on how much width an image should have compared to the width of the text (\textwidth)? Its looking somewhat weird to have it the same size as the width of text.

Thanks,
Ben

[pumpkinegan]

I would convert the screenshot (jpeg) to encapsulated postscript (eps).

[yateleybob]

If the screenshot is a bitmap (usual on MSWin) then use convert from the ImageMagick tools to convert to EPS (uses ghostscript). Either scale at that point or, better,

\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}

...
\includegrahics[scale=0.3]{screenshot.eps}

or whatever scale you like.

[benowar]

Right, I already found out that I should save the graphics as PDF. But I wonder regarding the DPI I should use. Does it make any difference if I save a 90dpi image in 300dpi and scale it by the factor of 3 (since its quite small now) compared to saving it with 72dpi and scaling it with a factor of 0.5 (since 72dpi makes it appear quite big)?

[darckhart]

IMO the easiest way to go about this is to figure out how you're going to print it and forget about scaling stuff. Then just plan to insert your raster <DPI> image exactly (exact dimensions and quality) how it will print out.

[angelixd]

\includegraphics takes a width argument that will scale your graphic to the correct proportional size, so you can do something like

Code: Select all

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{calc}
...

\includegraphics[width=\textwidth * .75]{whatever.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{somegraphic.pdf}

or whatever set size you want it to be; I usually just enter absolute sizes when I use it. LaTeX does a pretty good job of scaling without artifacts; and I'm mostly working with including .png graphics with an alpha channel.