{"id":246,"date":"2009-02-09T12:10:05","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T17:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/09\/resolution-independent-screenshots\/"},"modified":"2009-02-09T12:10:07","modified_gmt":"2009-02-09T17:10:07","slug":"resolution-independent-screenshots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/09\/resolution-independent-screenshots\/","title":{"rendered":"Resolution Independent Screenshots"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leopard includes technology that generates (mostly) resolution independent<\/a> screenshots. That means when you enlarge the pictures, they won’t get pixelated, and more importantly, they will stay sharp when printed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a printout of text mixed with a screenshot of text, but it looks like ass<\/em>. That’s because even a very cheap printer is much higher resolution then your screen. It prints text very sharply. But when it prints the screen shot, it reproduces the low resolution display in high-fedelity — which actually makes it look worse. Plus, computers use tricks (eg sub pixel antialiasing<\/a>) to make text look sharper on LCD screens — but those tricks can backfire on other media. A screenshot grabs exactly the pixels shown on the screen. And those pixels are optimized to be shown on a screen, not paper.<\/p>\n

Example<\/h3>\n

Here’s an example screenshot (PDF)<\/a>. It looks like this:
\n\"Preview.png\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you open it<\/a>, and zoom in, you will see that the text stays sharp, while some (but not all) of the interface gets pixelated.<\/p>\n

\"PreviewBlownUp.png\"<\/div>\n

How it Was Made<\/h3>\n

When Automator.app (click to open)<\/a> saves a workflow, it puts a (mostly) resolution-independent screenshot of the workflow’s UI inside it. The screenshot is at SomeWorkflow.workflow\/Contents\/QuickLook\/Preview.pdf<\/code>. (In Finder, right-click a .workflow<\/code> file, and choose “Show Package Contents” to look inside it).<\/p>\n

If you print a workflow to a PDF file, it has the same limited resolution-independence. So I suspect Automator.app generates this PDF in much the same way files are printed. I have not investigated why the gray border is vectorized as well as the text. If anyone has an insight there, I’d love to hear it.<\/p>\n

In the future<\/a>, I expect text, and most UI elements, to be represented as vectors at every level of the OS. Screenshots will capture those vector-elements, as as they capture pixel-elements (pixels) today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leopard includes technology that generates (mostly) resolution independent screenshots. That means when you enlarge the pictures, they won’t get pixelated, and more importantly, they will stay sharp when printed. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a printout of text mixed with a screenshot of text, but it looks like ass. That’s because even a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,3,4],"tags":[117,87,279,225,226],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcement","category-macosx","category-programming","tag-futurism","tag-leopard","tag-mac-os-x","tag-pixels","tag-vectors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}