Once in a while, I need to take a picture of the screen with a menu pulled down, in order to document one of my shareware programs. If I did this every day, I suppose I wouldnﾕt mind paying for a screen capture program with all the bells and whistles, but as it is, I resist. Years ago, there was a tiny freeware extension called StillDown, by Gregory M. Robbins, that enabled command-shift-3 screen shots with menus pulled down. But StillDown doesnﾕt work with Mac OS 8. Therefore, I decided to write a new free bare-bones menu snapshot program: MenuCapture.
To install MenuCapture, drop it in your Control Panels folder and reboot.
To use MenuCapture, open the MenuCapture control panel and click the ﾒEnableﾓ checkbox. Then pull down a menu, and press the keys command, shift, and control simultaneously. What happens next depends on what version of the system you are running. With System 7.6 or later, the cursor turns into a cross-hair, and you can click and drag to select a region to be copied to the clipboard. With earlier systems, a snapshot of the whole screen is saved as a picture file on your disk.
The actual picture-taking is done by the built-in screen capture FKEYs: FKEY 4 in the case of System 7.6 and later, FKEY 3 in the case of older software that did not have FKEY 4.
MenuCapture may be uploaded to archives and placed on CD-ROM collections, so long as it is unmodified and this document remains with it.
Change history:
version 1.0.1 checks the system version rather than checking for the existence of FKEY 4. This is because someone using a system before 7.6 might have installed some other FKEY 4.
