When producing documentation for 4D applications you may find it useful to include screen shots (Images of Macintosh or Windows interface elements) to illustrate key concepts. Or perhaps you need to convince your 4D developer that you are not insane and a certain error dialog really is popping up. In any case there are, of course, commercial utilities that will let you do this and more - but both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems have the built-in ability to take Images of their screen display.

When taking screen shots on the Macintosh, pictures will be saved as files at the top level of your startup volume as "Picture 1", "Picture 2", etc. in PICT format:

Command+Shift+3
Take a shot of the whole screen

Command+Shift+4
Take a shot of a rectangle - drag mouse pointer after typing

Command+Shift+4 w/ Caps Lock down
Take a shot of a single window - click in the window after typing

When taking a screen shot on Windows, the picture will be placed on the clipboard and can be pasted into a graphics application such as MS Paint and saved as a BMP file:

Print Screen key
Take a shot of the whole screen

Alt+Print Screen
Take a shot of the active window