High resolution screen-shots

[Roberto Ragusa]

Chris Mohler wrote:
> Yikes - I thought so....
> 
> I tried Roberto's suggestion and set up a huge virtual screen - but all
> of the icons, text, etc were still small - just on a larger area.
> 
> If you could  make the gui/text bigger, the virtual screen ought to give
> you a higher resolution.

If you just increase the size of the fonts of the text, the resolution
will be good enough for vector-tracing and OCR programs.
Of course you would have a screenshot with tiny icons, tiny window borders
and big text.

I haven't understood yet why Paul wants to trace the bitmap.
The numbers are already available in text format, so they can be exported
in some way (just copy & paste).

If the goal is to have a "better" image because the normal screenshot is
ugly when printed, well, there is no solution. The image is made of
pixels and the only thing you can do is print those pixel on the paper.
If the result has apparently a too low resolution, it is because it
*has* a lower resolution.

Comparing the same text, with same dimensions (in actual millimeters)
on a monitor and on paper (better if from a good laser printer) will
easily show that the paper (let's say 600 or 1200 dpi) is much sharper
than the screen (typically around 72 dpi, but a 1600x1200 15.4" LCD
will give you 133 dpi).
The text on the screen is sometimes readable only because of heavy
tricks used to improve the quality (antialiasing, subpixel rendering).

The future will certainly give us a vector based GUI, where everything
will have infinite resolution internally, and rasterization will
be done just before displaying or printing.
In that case the "snapshot" program could capture the internal
vector representation.
There is a lot of work to be done to achieve that; broad adoption
of SVG and improvements to graphics driver are some of the pieces.

Best regards.
-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it