Grab

Apple has long made it easy to “take snapshots” of your Mac screen and parts thereof. Mac OS X provides this capability via the Grab utility. The Grab utility is fully described in Chapter 6.

Grab lends its services to other applications, allowing you to take a snapshot of the entire screen, a selection, or a timed screen shot, as shown in Figure 11-2.

Figure 11-2: Grab Services include full screen, screen selection, and timed full-screen captures.

For example, while working in TextEdit, you can choose TextEdit Services Grab Screen and a full-screen picture would be inserted in your TextEdit document at the current insertion point. Figure 11-3 shows a partial screen capture inserted into a Text Edit document.

Figure 11-3: The Grab service has captured part of the screen and inserted it into a TextEdit document.

Screen Capture without Grab

Incidentally, you can capture the full screen or a selected area without using the Grab utility. This has nothing to do with services, but is such a helpful thing to know, it is included here for your convenience. The following keystrokes do the trick:

• Command-Shift-3 captures the full screen.

• Command-Shift-4 provides a crosshairs pointer to select the area you want captured. Drag the pointer diagonally to define the selection rectangle.

With either keystroke, the screen shot is saved as a PDF file on the Desktop.

As mentioned previously, the Grab service’s commands appear dimmed when you try to access them from the Finder. Many users have found this a tad confusing. But the Finder cannot produce a document for the Grab service to place its results in; it only produces Finder windows. Instead, use the Grab utility with the Finder; or use Mac OS X’s screen capture commands, described in the sidebar “Screen Capture without Grab.”