Copyright: © 1994 Clifton Karnes. All Rights Reserved


Contents
Clip-In

The Plug-In for Windows' Clipboard

Copyright © 1993, 1994 Clifton Karnes.

All Rights Reserved.

 Introduction

 Installing Clip-In

 Running Clip-In

 Clip-In Examples

 How to Register Clip-In


 Introduction

WHAT IS CLIP-IN?

Clip-In is a plug-in for Windows' Clipboard Viewer that turns Clipboard Viewer into a real screen capture tool. With Clip-In plugged in, you'll have several items added to Clipboard Viewer's Control menu that will give you the power to

 Capture rectangular areas of the screen.

 Capture screen objects (windows and child windows--toolboxes, toolbars, list boxes, buttons, and so on).

 Capture the entire desktop (the same function as pressing the Print Screen key).

 Capture the active window (the same function as pressing the Alt-Print Screen key combination).

 Display the size in pixels of images captured with Clip-In.

 Dynamically display the size of the moving capture rectangle (when Hide Clip-In During Captures is unchecked).

WHY CLIP-IN?

Windows offers two built-in screen capture hotkeys:

Print Screen captures the entire desktop to the Clipboard.

Alt-Print Screen captures the active Window to the Clipboard.

These hotkeys are extremely useful, but they're limited.

Often you need to capture a section of a screen, and sometimes it's necessary to capture a child window (a  toolbar or MDI child window, for example). In both of these cases, Alt-Print Screen and Print Screen either capture too much or too little. That's why I wrote Clip-In.

Clip-In attaches itself to Clipboard Viewer and adds seven items to Clipboard's Control menu. With Clip-In plugged into Clipboard, you be able to capture rectangular areas of the screen by clicking and dragging the mouse, and you'll be able to capture child windows by simply pointing and clicking. And when used with Windows' Paintbrush, Clip-In gives you the tools you need to cleanly save images in BMP or PCX format.

CLIP-IN HELP FILE TIPS

There are two easy ways to navigate between the topics in this help file.

 Simply press the right mouse button in any Clip-In help window and a menu of the available topics will pop up. To move to a topic, click on the menu item. (As a note, this right-click popup menu is a feature that's possible for help authors to add to any help file, but it's undocumented.)

Click the right mouse button to summon Clip-In's help file popup menu.

 Choose Goto from the Clip-In Help menu bar, and you'll see a list of available topics.

WHAT IS SHAREWARE?

Thank you for trying Clip-In. Clip-In is shareware and is provided at no charge to you for evaluation. Please feel free to share an evaluation copy with your friends. If you find this program useful, please register it.

WHY REGISTER?

When you register Clip-In, you'll get two things:

 You'll receive a registered copy of the latest version of Clip-In on disk.

 You'll be advised of future releases of Clip-In.

HOW MUCH?

 Individual copies of Clip-In are $15 each.

 Corporate licenses are available for $150 each.

THE FINE PRINT

Please note that Clip-In is provided as is and without warranty of any kind, either express or implied.


 Installing Clip-In

HOW TO INSTALL CLIP-IN

To install Clip-In:

 Copy CLIP-IN.EXE and CLIP-IN.HLP to any directory. If you're not sure where to put them, copy them in your WINDOWS directory (usually C:\WINDOWS).

 Install Clip-In on Program Manager's Main group by dragging its executable file, CLIP-IN.EXE, from File Manager to the Main group in Program Manager, or by choosing File, New, Program Item from Program Manager's menu and typing Clip-In in the description box and the path to CLIP-IN.EXE in the command Line box.

To run Clip-In, double-click on its icon.

Clip-In is a plug-in for Windows' Clipboard Viewer. If Clipboard Viewer is running, Clip-In plugs itself in. If Clipboard Viewer isn't running, Clip-In will load it and plug itself in.

When you run Clip-In, you won't notice anything unusual at first (note that the unregistered version of Clip-In changes Clipboard Viewer's title bar to "Unregistered Clip-In"), but Clip-In has plugged itself into Clipboard and added its commands to Clipboard's Control menu.

To see Clip-In's additions (and verify that the program has loaded correctly), simply click on Clipboard Viewer's Control menu box. (Note that all of Clipboard Viewer's commands are still available from Clipboard Viewer's menu bar.)

When you click on the Control menu box, you'll see Clip-In's special functions added to the menu.

Hide Clipboard During Captures

Capture Desktop

Capture Active Window

Capture Rectangle

Capture Object

Run Paintbrush

Clip-In Help

About Clip-In

For more information on using these menu items, see the next section, Running Clip-In

STRATEGY

You'll probably want to use Clip-In instead of Clipboard Viewer all the time, because with Clip-In, you get all the usual features of the Viewer, plus all of Clip-In's features. You can install Clip-In on your Main group, beside Clipboard Viewer and on any supplemental launchers, like menu programs, that you use.

Advanced users: If you rename the executable file, CLIP-IN.EXE, be sure the rename Clip-In's help file with the same base name. For example, if you wanted to rename Clip-In's executable to CX.EXE, you'd need to rename the help file to CX.HLP. Like many other Windows programs, Clip-In looks for its help file in the same directory as the executable and with the same base name plus a HLP extension.


 Running Clip-In

HOW TO USE CLIP-IN

Here's a rundown on each Clip-In menu item.

 Hide Clipboard During Captures hides the Clipboard Viewer window while you make your capture, if this option is checked. This is the default, because normally you want to get the Clipboard out of the picture. When this option is checked, Clip-In activates the previously activated window, which is also usually what you want.

If you don't want to hide the Clipboard Viewer during the capture, simply select the option from the menu to uncheck it. You might want to keep the Clipboard on screen if you need to take a picture of it, if you want to see the size of the capture rectangle displayed, or if you want to trim an image that's in Clipboard's main window.

 Capture Desktop captures the entire desktop. If Hide Clipboard During Captures is checked (the default), Clipboard is hidden before the screen is captured.

 Capture Active Window captures the last active window, which means the window that was active before you activated Clip-In to capture it. If Hide Clipboard During Captures is checked (the default), Clipboard is hidden before the screen is captured.

 Capture Rectangle lets you capture a rectangular area of the screen by clicking and dragging the mouse. If Hide Clipboard During Captures is checked (the default), Clipboard is hidden before the screen is captured.

To capture a rectangular area, select Capture Rectangle, move the mouse pointer to any corner, click the left button, drag the mouse pointer to the opposite corner, and release the button. The most common way to do this is to move the mouse pointer to the upper left corner of the region, click the left mouse button, and drag the mouse pointer to the lower right corner.

 Capture Object captures the Windows object under the mouse pointer. You'll see the pointer change to a hand with a pointing finger and a thin outline will surround the currently selected child window. To capture the window, simply click the mouse button.

 Run Paintbrush runs the Windows Paintbrush program. You can use Paintbrush to edit, touch up, or save your captures in BMP or PCX format.

 Clip-In Help calls the Help file for Clip-In.

 About Clip-In calls the Clip-In About box, which has version and registration information.


 Clip-In Examples

SAVING IMAGES AS CLP FILES

When you capture a screen with Clip-In, you can easily save it as a CLP (Clipboard format file). To do this, go to the File menu, select Save As, and type the filename you want to use for the image.

SAVING IMAGES AS BMP OR PCX FILES

It's almost as easy to save your captures as BMP or PCX files. You do this, run Paintbrush (choose Run Paintbrush from the Clip-In menu), paste the image into Paintbrush, and save the result in BMP or PCX format. As you've probably noticed, when you capture an image with Clip-In, it displays the size of the image in the caption. Although this is interesting information, it's real value is that you can create a Paintbrush picture exactly the same size as the image. Here are the steps:

 Capture your image in Clip-In.

 Run Paintbrush.

 Go to Options, Image Attributes, for Units select Pels (which is the same as pixels), and in the Width and Height boxes, type in the dimensions of your image that Clip-In displayed in its caption. Next, click on OK and choose Paste from the Edit menu. Your image should fit exactly.

 Next, choose Save As from the File menu and under Save File As Type, choose the kind of file you want to save. Your options will be something like the following:

PCX

Monochrome bitmap

16-color bitmap

256-color bitmap

24-bit bitmap

Choose a file type, enter a filename, and click on OK. That's all there is to it.

CAPTURE SCENARIOS

Here's a list of some common capture scenarios and how you'd use Clip-In and the built-in hotkeys, Print Screen and Alt-Print Screen.

Capture the desktop. To capture the entire desktop, simply press the Print Screen key, or select Capture Desktop from Clip-In's menu.

Capture active window. To capture the active window, press the Alt-Print Screen key combination, or select Capture Active window from Clip-In's menu.

Capture child MDI window. If you want to capture a child MDI window, such as a Program Manager group, a document window from SysEdit, or a directory pane from File Manager, choose Capture Object from Clip-In's menu, move the mouse pointer hand over the title bar of the window you want to capture, and click.

Capture a dialog box. Dialog boxes can almost always be captured as the active window, so use Clip-In's Capture Active Window menu selection, or use Alt-Print Screen. If this doesn't work, try Capture Object.

Capture a menu. This is tricky. You need to use the Alt-Print Screen hotkey, but pressing the Alt key when a menu is on the screen deactivates the menu. Here are the steps to follow.

 Press the Alt key and select the menu with its access key. For example, press Alt-F for the File menu.

 Continue to hold down the Alt key.

 Move the cursor keys to select the menu item you want to highlight (continue to hold down the Alt key).

 Press Print Screen while the Alt key is still pressed.

 Now you have an image of the entire desktop with the menu selected. To create an image of just the menu itself, display the screen in Clip-In, uncheck Hide Clipboard During Captures, select Capture Rectangle, and drag the mouse over the menu image in Clipboard Viewer's window to trim it.

Capture a window and a child dialog. This is a common situation that's difficult to handle without a program like Clip-In. There are two ways to capture these windows. Perhaps the easiest is to use Capture Rectangle and outline an area around both windows. If the dialog box appears inside the main window's frame, you can choose Capture Object and click on the main window's title bar.

Capture an icon. There are two ways to do this.

The first way is to display the icon in Program Manager (or any program that displays icons) and choose Capture Rectangle and outline the icon to capture it.

Hint: Icons are 32 x 32, so leave Clip-In restored when you capture (toggle Hide Clipboard During Captures off) so you can see the capture rectangle's size displayed in its title bar, and capture an area that's close to 32 x 32. The dimensions don't have to be exactly right.

The second way to capture an icon is to run the program who's icon you want to capture, minimize it to show its icon, select Capture Object, and click over the icon. The captured icon will probably be 36 x 36 instead of 32 x 32, but this usually will be close enough to work with.

Dynamically display the size of the capture area. Sometimes, when capturing a rectangular area of the screen, you may want to see the size of the rectangle as you're dragging it. This is important if you're trying to capture an area of a specific size. The easiest way to do this is to uncheck Hide Clipboard During Captures and resize the Clipboard Viewer window so just the title bar is visible. Next, move the Clipboard Viewer window to an area of the display you're not going to capture and select Capture Rectangle from the Control menu. You'll see the size of your rectangle dynamically displayed in Clipboard Viewer's title bar.


How to Register
 How to Register Clip-In

To print this registration form, select Print Topic from the File menu, or click on the button below.

 Click this button to print the registration form.

Clip-In is $15 for individual copies and $150 for site licenses. You can order Clip-In by printing and completing this form and sending it along with a check or money order to the address below.

Please make checks or money orders payable to Clifton Karnes, and mail your order to the following address:

Clifton Karnes

2519 Overbrook Drive

Greensboro, NC 27408

Please send me _____________ copies of Clip-In, version 1.0 at $15.00 (U.S.) per copy (3½-inch disks will be sent unless requested otherwise.)

Subtotal:  	__________________

Shipping and handling: 	$2.00 (For foreign orders, add $10.00)

Total:	__________________

Send Clip-In to:

Name:	_________________________________________________________

Company (optional):	_________________________________________________________

Address:	_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

City, State, ZIP:	_________________________________________________________

My copy of Clip-In came from

__ CompuServe

__ GEnie

__ America Online

__ BIX

__ Local BBS ___________________________

__ Other _______________________________


Control menu

You access an application's Control menu (sometimes called the System menu), by clicking on the Control menu box, located in the upper-left corner of the window. The Control menu usually has options for restoring, minimizing, and maximizing windows, to name a few. Some programs, like Clip-In, add commands to an application's Control menu.