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I'm not sure this is the optimal forum for my question, but I made my best guess. Please advise me if a different forum would be more suitable.

As you probably already deduced, I want to know how I can get crisper screen shots for pasting into documents (Libre Office, to be specific, but with the web as the ultimate location, specifically my Substack newsletter).

I utilize screen shots quite a bit; sometimes they look fine, sometimes they are fuzzier than Fuzzy Wuzzy (the erstwhile bear).

For example, here's one fuzzy one:

enter image description here

Actually, it looks okay here, but in Libre Office it's 9 times uglier than a bag of butts.

To generate screen shots, I simply press the PrtSc button on my keyboard and paste it into Paint.

Is there a better way? Or something I can do after the fact to sharpen up the image?

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    Is your final product a PDF file for the newsletter?
    – Rafael
    Aug 4, 2020 at 4:52
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    I don't see anything fuzzy. There's nothing wrong with it. Are you zooming in on the image or enlarging it? If so, you can't do that and expect it to look good. If you view a raster image at anything other that 1:1 (100%) then it won't look good.
    – Billy Kerr
    Aug 4, 2020 at 8:18
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    Screenshots are probably fine, as I believe there is zero compression when you actually hit the PRT SCR key. Then, the actual software you're using to lay out documents may have its own compression settings that we don't know about.
    – Lucian
    Aug 4, 2020 at 8:30
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    What @Lucian said. A screenshot cannot be "sharper" than the actual pixels that you capture. My bet is LibreOffice uses a low quality JPEG compression. Check if this can be changed, possibly by not pasting in a document but saving your screenshots as external files and then importing them.
    – Jongware
    Aug 4, 2020 at 12:52
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    I prefer to use a third party screen cap utility which allows me to grab screens at 400%. Then then can be easily resampled to much, much higher resolutions.
    – Scott
    Aug 4, 2020 at 19:04

1 Answer 1

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It seems that you are using Libre Office to add some notes, or markings to the screen capture. And exporting them from there.

Some programs, like office programs, tend to embed photos but with no control over the original size, they most likely resample it during some part of the process, either during import or during export.

The example you posted has sharp text but the icons are a bit blurry, this could be the nature of the icons, probably raster images.

But the blurriness is more noticeable on the link you posted of your newsletter.

Seeing the usage of your captures, I would suggest that you change your workflow and use something else for the annotations.

Either save the screen captures directly (as Png) and use some other raster only software, like Krita, FireAlpaca, MyPaint, PaintNet, or Gimp, to make the annotations, and export again as PNG.

I would suggest that you do not apply any scaling to the screen captures, with the probable exception of max-with for mobile devices.

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