Screenshots

Before taking a screenshot

• Resize the window to be as small as possible (avoid large empty areas). Images wider than ~900px or so will be scaled down even on a widescreen monitor when displayed in the Help Center.
  • GitHub Preview displays them slightly wider however, up to ~1000px.
• Keep it simple. Close unrelated tabs, etc.
• Take care to capture the entire window or other relevant part of the screen, making sure no elements are cut. The image can be more precisely cropped later, if needed.

Windows 10

• PrtSc to copy fullscreen to clipboard. Paste in an image editor.
• Windows + PrtSc to save fullscreen to Pictures > Screenshots.
• Alt + Windows + PrtSc to save a window screenshot to the Videos/Captures folder.

macOS

• CMD + Ctrl + 3 for fullscreen screenshot
• CMD + Ctrl + 4 for select area.
  • In this mode, press Space to take a window screenshot.

Editing screenshots

Style guide

In case you need to highlight a specific button or areas on the screen:

• If the screenshot is borderless with a light color, additional contract is needed. Increase the canvas width by 200 px and height by 100 px (total, not for each side), then add background color (see color codes below).
• Highlight using a 2px or 4px orange rectangle (see color codes below).
• If the highlighting is hard to discern, add a white overlay outside the highlighted box. 60% opacity is standard, but it may need to be adapted depending on the background.

Color	RGB	HEX
Background	(210, 248, 246)	#d2f8f6
Highlight	(230, 126, 34)	#e67e22

Example

Here is a screenshot of the IDE taken with CMD + Ctrl + 4 on macOS, and pressing Space to capture the window.

We can highlight the Serial Monitor button with a 2 px border:

The width is quite small for the resolution, let’s make it 4 px.

Still, since it’s far out in the corner, we can direct the eyes a bit more by adding an overlay.

Now the screenshot is quite bright, to create some contrast on a white page we’ll add the colored background:

Done!

Example using Inkscape

Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor. Learn how to use it to edit your screenshots.

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1. Download the screenshot template.

2. Select the Screenshot layer on the right side menu.

If the menu is not visible, you can access it by pressing the Ctrl+Shift+L.

3. Press Ctrl+I to import your screenshot.

4. Move the screenshot to the Working Area.

5. To create contrast, press Ctrl+D to duplicate the Background and drag it under the screenshot.

6. Duplicate the 2px or 4px Highlight rectangle and place it over the part that you want to emphasise.

8. Duplicate the Overlay rectangle and drag it over the screenshot and background.

9. To draw attention to the highlighted parts, we need to adjust the inner Overlay rectangle to the Highlight rectangle.

10. Double click on the Overlay rectangle.

The cursor will change to Edit path by nodes (N) mode.

11. Left click over one of the corners and adjust it to the Highlight rectangle.

You can move each corner freely and use the cusp to corner function to surround the highlighted part with precision.

12. The screenshot is ready to export!

10. To export your screenshot, select the elements that you want to export.

11. Press Shift+Crtl+E to open the Export menu.

12. Click on Export or Export As to export your file.