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By Carla Wardin
Submitted by Jackie Damrau
Technical writers, like many professions, have their own communities, lingo, issues — and yes, discussion topics of which they never tire.
One of these topics is which screen capture application works best for them. SnagIt, which continues to demonstrate its longevity in its eleventh year, is a crowd favorite. Why? Technical writers have a range of reasons for their decisions, but it mostly breaks down to flexibility, power and choice.
Flexibility
Part of the reason for SnagIt's popularity is because it's so accommodating to users — it's not an application that is used in only one way. To compensate users for the variety of uses, SnagIt lets you create and save Capture Profiles.
Capture Profiles save you from changing the configuration each time you change your capture task. You can create and name profiles which store the specific settings, along with a unique hotkey to start the capture. When you hit the hotkey or select the profile along with the capture button, you perform the specific capture mode. This way, you can easily switch between different combinations without opening menus and clicking buttons. Ultimately, Capture Profiles are one of SnagIt's biggest time savers.
One technical writer who considers profiles a great service is John Posada, senior technical writer at Barnes & Noble.com. He uses SnagIt because of "its depth." He said, "SnagIt has a good variety of configurations. I like that I can configure multiple configurations, assign each one to a key combination, and then I don't have to continually change settings."
Power
SnagIt is also renowned for the power of the program. For example, SnagIt allows you to save images as a JPEG, BMP, animated GIF, TIF, TGA, PNG and PCX. With all these image file types, you can experiment to maximize your SnagIt capabilities.
For example, technical writer Larrie Funk of Teleformix has noted that commercial printers commonly use printing programs that prefer the TIF format. He said, "If you're using JPEG, you can get away with that for in-house use, but if you're sending something out to be commercially printed, you want to use the TIF format for your images." He'd done manuals before and sent them to the printers, and the pictures would be "all over the place" when using the JPEG image format. He explained, "Printer programs are written in such a manner that they prefer the TIF format and have less trouble working with it. I used SnagIt to change all my images to TIF format and lo and behold - no problems!"
When technical writers use SnagIt to make their work even more instructive than before, they really demonstrate its power. For instance, Mr. Funk uses SnagIt in creating help systems. He said, "I use SnagIt to do a screen capture in the program I'm writing about. Then I click on a box in that screen to launch the next function. I screen grab that function too - then in the help system I make a hotspot over the box you would normally click on, so when you move the cursor over the box and click, it brings up a popup of that next function."
SnagIt also excels in helping technical writers with the small details, such as autonumbering the captures, automatic trimming, and printing multiple images on a page.
Choice
SnagIt has, not 10, not 20, but 42 different ways to capture. Obviously, for people who spend their day capturing images, the options make a difference.
In particular, John Schnack, technical writer at Financial Profiles, Inc appreciates the variety of capture methods and features, since SnagIt offers capture options that rival all other programs. He listed, "Active window, region, menu, specification of output folders, resolution, file format — I have so many options."
He continued, "Since I have to create hi-resolution and low-resolution versions of each screen capture, SnagIt's ability to specify a resolution, file format, and output folder make the process really easy."
In addition, the SnagIt Studio offers even more choices for the discerning technical writer. When they want to draw attention to a particular part of your capture, clarify to someone exactly what they are seeing, or make sure people note a certain small aspect of a picture they might be in danger of missing, they make use of SnagIt Studio.
Annotation objects help explain images, and the editor offers an expansive catalog of useful annotation objects. Choose from:
Find the software with all the service and convenience you need. Just think…technical writers make their living explaining concepts to others. If they depend on SnagIt, shouldn't you?
Reprinted with permission.