Cropper

Point and shoot screen captures

Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site.


The basic Cropper UI

Plugins

A community plug-in project is available at http://www.codeplex.com/cropperplugins

Controls

• Right-Click: Context menu on main form.
• Arrow keys: Nudge form one pixel.
• Alt+Arrow keys: Resize form one pixel.
• [ or ]: Resize entire form while keeping the crosshairs centered.
• Alt+[ or ]: Resize the thumbnail indicator one pixel.
• Double-Click or Enter: Take a screen shot or start/stop a recording plug-in.
• Tab: Cycle form colors.
• Shift+Tab: Cycle form sizes.
• Esc: Hide the main form.
• F8: Show the main form.

Output Options

Cropper is able to output images to a variety of formats. There is an extensibility model allowing developers to create custom output plug-ins. Descriptions of some of the default plug-ins are given below.

• BMP: Large files but no compression artifacts.
• PNG: Smaller files with lossless compression, good for most image formats except full color photographic. Think of it as a replacement for the simpler GIF format. All modern browsers can display a png file.
• JPEG: Good for full color photographic images. Cropper can save jpg's in varying quality settings from 10 to 100. 10 being the lowest quality and smallest file size. 100 being the highest quality and largest file size. A quality setting of 60-70 is usually good for the web. It's a good trade off between file size and image quality.
• Clipboard: The image is placed on the clipboard and can be pasted into any application that accepts images.
• Printer: Presents a print dialog that allows you to send the image straight to the printer.

Known Issues

• The maximum size of the crop form is smaller than the screen size. This is a limitation of the way the UI is currently drawn. There is an area of transparent form around the visible area which causes Cropper to appear to be smaller than the maximum form size. With the original usage of cropping out small areas of the screen this was not pressing problem.

Source Notes

Things that may be of interest to C# developers in the sourcecode.

• Cropper.Core.Plugins: Loading assemblies at runtime using reflection and temporary AppDomains.
• Cropper.Extensibility.ImagePairNames: Operator overloading.
• Cropper.Core.ImageCapture.FetchCapture: Using delegates and call backs to retrieve an Image and (Cropper.Core.ImageCapture.FetchOutputStream) a Stream.
• Cropper.Core.CropFormConfiguration: XML serialization and deserialization.

Each plug-in makes use of multiple delegates and events. The plug-ins are passed a reference to the host, and each one can subscribe to the events exposed by the host.


Release History



Windows Developer Power Tools