Screen Grabs saving as PDFs?

[iChief]

I'm a Mac newbie - I just recently bought an iBook - and I love it! However, I'm having a small but annoying problem with the Grab utility.

The first couple of times I used Grab the images were saved as JPEGs which would default open with Preview which was great - exactly what I would have wanted. However now, whenever I do a screen grab the images are saved as PDFs and they default open with Acrobat Reader. I don't know how this happened and I want to reverse it (Reader's too slow to boot up).

I've opened Grab from the Utilities folder and had a look at Preferences but I can't seem to find out how to change it.

Any help would be much appreciated for this, I know, insignificant but frustrating problem.

 

[Brize]

There are a couple of things to consider here:

First, you don't need to use the Grab utility. Command-Shift-3 will take a full screenshot; Command-Shift-4 will allow you to select an area of the screen to capture, and Command-Shift-4 and then spacebar will change your cursor to a camera that will capture selected windows.

In terms of setting default applications, use Ctrl-Click on a PDF file, click 'Get Info', change the 'Open With' application, and then click 'Change All'.

Finally, to convert PDF to jpeg, use File>Export from the Preview menu.

Enjoy the iBook!

 

[iChief]

Thanks Brize - I'll try those when I get home. I'm at work at the mo' working on a Windoze machine - crashed on me twice already today!

Yeah, I'm totally enjoying my iBook - no problems as yet - even the Grab thing was only a minor inconvenience.

How's things in old Blighty? I grew up in London but am now living in Ireland.

 

[7on]

And adding a control with those key combos will save the screen grab in the clipboard.

 

[yellow]

There are a couple of 3rd party apps out there that can do the same thing and save in a variety of formats.

My personal favorite is Snapz Pro X. With it you can capture the entire screen, the foremost app's window, or and area selection. You can also capture movies of what's going on on-screen. My only complaints with the new version is, 1) it's not exactly cheap (for the version w/movie capability), and 2) I cannot tell it to do something by default (i.e., by default, just grab the whole screen), which makes it useless for screengrabs when I'm beta testing games.

Here's some more 3rd party screen cap apps:
http://www.versiontracker.com/php/s...earch&str=screen+capture&plt[]=macos&x=13&y=8

For future references, http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ is a great place to look for software.

Enjoy your Mac.