Saving a picture from program

My friend wanted to save a picture from PDF file to some other document. Here is an advice which will work also for many other programs.

In the top right part of keyboard you will find button "Print Screen", probably marked by some abbreviation like "PrtSc". This button allows to capture the current screen contents as a picture, which can be inserted into a graphical editor like "Paint" in Windows.

You start Paint by clicking the button "Start", selecting a group "Accessories" and there "Paint". Quicker way: press both keys Windows and R (will open dialog "Run"), type "mspaint" (without quotation marks) and press Enter.

So first put on the screen what you want to "photograph". Press Ctrl and Print Screen (nothing visible happens so far). Start Paint and press Ctrl and V, or select "Edit" and "Paste" in menu. Now you copied into the program the photograph of the whole screen as an image. At the first time it may be a bit confusing to remember what is the original program and what is a picture of it. Now in graphical editor remove unneeded parts of the picture, edit if necessary, and save to disk. Later you can put the saved picture into your documents.

Key combination Alt and Print Screen has a similar effect, but instead of the whole screen it just photographs the current window. You will probably use this combination more often. But sometimes you cannot use it, for example when you want to photograph the opened menu of some program -- pressing Alt key would usually close the menu. In such situation, use Ctrl and Print Screen.

Some programs cannot be photographed this way, for example video players. Instead of video only black rectangle will appear on the photo. This is because a special way of communication between the program and graphic card; to make video fast enough, communication uses some "shortcuts" different from other programs; the functionality of *Print Screen* key does not recognize this shortcut.

This method is useable for many programs. Some of them have their own methods for copying. In program Adobe Reader you can click the button "Select" in the top button row, select a picture or its part, then start Paint and insert the picture. The result will probably be the same.

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