Dear Dr Deadline,
Do you answer technical questions? I am a sub on a small monthly business title and I am trying to find out how I can print “screen grabs” of websites within the magazine.
The doctor is here to answer all of your questions – ethical, practical, technical, even rhetorical.
The screen grab technique depends on what sort of computer you are using. If you are on an Apple Mac, try the following. With the web page you want to reproduce displayed on your screen, hold down the shift and Apple keys and hit the “3” key. If you’ve got the sound turned on, you’ll hear a sound like a camera shutter. This saves an image of your screen on to the computer’s hard disk.
To find it, look in the hard disk folder for a file called “Picture 1”, which you should be able to open with image software such as Photoshop. It’s a bitmap image, which may need to be converted to a Jpeg or a Tiff file before you can call it into QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign pages.
Note, if you do not delete the file from your hard disk, the next time you do the operation, the file will be called “Picture 2” and so on.
For PC Windows users, it’s a slightly different technique. Again with the website page displayed on your screen, hold down the control key and hit the key marked “Print Scrn”. This saves a copy of the screen image into your computer’s clipboard. You should now be able to paste that image directly into any programme using the “Paste” command – usually control-V. Again, it’s a bitmap file, so if you paste it into an image programme such as “Paint” (part of the Windows software usually) you’ll be able to save it as a Jpeg or Tiff for importing it into a page make-up package.
Dear Dr Deadline,
I am in my first job in journalism, working for a specialist trade magazine. When I’m asked at parties “what do you do for a living?”, I answer “journalist” and am immediately met with interested reactions. But the interest wanes the moment I answer their follow up question, “who do you work for?” It’s a quality publication, but with a rather deadly-sounding title. I feel disloyal if I lie, but how can I make myself sound more sexy?
Try this one: “I’m working on an investigations team looking into corporate malpractice in the petrochemicals sector.” (Or whichever sector you happen to report on.) If you can, make oblique references to Venezuala or South east Asia. It never fails. Not for Dr D, anyway.
Got any questions for Dr Deadline? Or do you disagree with his advice? E-mail him on doctordeadline@pressgazette.co.uk
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