[Pythoncard-users] better GIF screen shots on Windows

I just added a story to my blog about the stockprice sample.
  http://altis.manilasites.com/2002/02/03

While I was trying variations on making screen shots I finally realized why
the GIF images I make often look bad. I don't like to use JPEG for screen
shots since without a decent anti-aliasing algorithm such as you might find
in Photoshop or GIMP, the text in a JPEG screenshot generally gets fuzzy
with unsightly artifacts. A screen shot of a sample that uses a lot of
colors such as proof or hopalong has to be done as a JPEG.

Most of the time I run my system in True Color (32 bit). I use Alt+Print
Screen in order to capture a screen shot of the front most window or just
Print Screen to capture the whole screen including any open menu and cursor.
This is on Windows 2000. Other versions of Windows may be slightly
different.

Then I bring up Microsoft Paint which comes with Windows and paste that into
a new document and save in GIF format. When the image is converted to GIF,
the colors are reduced to 256 (8-bit) and at that point any smooth color
gradients get messed up.

Windows 2000 by default uses a color gradient for the Active and Inactive
Title Bars, but if you set Color and Color 2 in the dialog to the same color
then you'll no longer have a gradient and screen shots converted to GIF
won't look messed up.

I've attached a screen shot of the Display Properties dialog in Windows
showing where you set the Active Title Bar and Inactive Title Bar colors.

ka