Screenshot Library
When you are capturing a screenshot for a blog post, for posting to the community, or for a fact sheet/customer story, please follow these directions for the best quality output from JMP.
As a general rule, we aim to have a WYSIWYG approach to screenshots. That means:
- Use the defaults that JMP provides -- don't change the fonts, colors or styles of JMP. We want users to be able to easily re-create what they see in our materials.
- Tweak the settings of Windows 7 so that you don't utilize the transparency feature (see below for details).
- Take screenshots using the WINDOWS version of JMP - 90% of our users are on Windows operating systems.
- If you have access to a Retina mac, take screenshots using the Retina screen and make sure you have Parallels turned to "Best for Retina" (See Fig 1). Note: you have to take the screenshot on the Retina monitor, this will not work if you use your mac in "closed-book" mode or extended to a non-retina external monitor.
- If your screenshots are to be printed out, consider capturing the screenshot using a vector format (see below of details).
Figure 1. "Best for Retina" section of Graphics menu in Parallels.
OK here are the best practices:
This guide assumes that you are capturing screenshots using a Retina Mac (MacBook Pro 13 or 15, example), Parallels in Coherence mode and that you want to capture the Windows UI elements, which we often want to do. This is the way to get the best-looking screenshots that work both in print and online.
Figure 2. Graphs Preference Group, set to Defaults.
- All screenshots should be captured on the Windows version of JMP, unless we are specifically calling out Mac-only features.
- It is necessary to adjust the Windows interface of Windows 7 (the menu bar, etc.) to make sure transparency is turned off. Right-click on the Windows desktop and click Personalize. Click on Window Color, choose Sky and use approximately 35% color intensity. Uncheck Enable transparency if it is checked. This is shown in Fig. 3
Figure 3. Personalization options in Windows 7 for best-looking screenshots.
- Now it's time to capture the screenshot. Turn on "coherence mode" from the Parallels Icon
in your Mac menu bar. (View > Enter Coherence).
- To take a screenshot automatically using the screenshot affordance on the Mac, create the JMP report you want to turn into a screenshot then type COMMAND-SHIFT-4 on you keyboard. Hover over the window to be captured for the screenshot and press the SPACE BAR. This will automatically capture a perfectly-cropped view of the window you are interested in. This gives me a pretty high resolution screenshot that preserves the Windows UI elements. As shown in Fig. 4, this Generalized Regression screenshot is about 4MP (2k x 2k in dimensions).
Figure 4. Generalized Regression screenshot dimensions in Retina mode of my Mac.
- This gives me approximately a 7"x7" printed file @ 300 DPI, which is larger than most screenshots we print in fact sheets, and plenty big for the web. Fig. 5 shows the resulting full-size screenshot.
Figure 5. Resulting high-resolution screenshot captured using the above method.
--------------------------------------
For most people, the above workflow works fine. I've changed my mind since 2014 when I first developed this workflow. In 2014, Retina Macs were not so widely deployed at SAS so the standard screenshot process as described about does not work so well when the screenshot is being used in print. The best quality screenshots are still created using the below method, which results in vector images. I've written a number of blog posts about this and presented a Discovery paper. The Discovery Paper is likely the best and most recent resource at this point.
As an aside -- this is a good time to set your Windows selection settings to something with a bit more contrast than the default blue that Windows 7 provides. Note this is a Windows setting, not a JMP setting. Again you will go to the Personalization part of Windows 7 (Right-click desktop, click personalize or Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization). Click "Window Color" and then select. Fig. 6 shows the settings I use. Change Selected Items from Blue to Yellow, and change the Font Color from White to Black.
Figure 6. Window Color and Appearance adjustments to change blue selection to yellow.
Back to vector graphics...
- Vector images work best for producing publication-quality graphics. The best way to capture them is to use the Selector tool (keyboard shortcut ‘S’) and highlight the graph or part of the report that will become the final screenshot. It will turn yellow (now that you just changed the Selected Items color). To save just this selected piece of the JMP report use Edit ->Save Selection As. Choose EMF (Enhanced Metafile). This format preserves transparency, if present, and can be opened up easily in Adobe Illustrator. And because it is a vector file, it can be scaled or resized without losing clarity. This is shown in Fig. 7.
Figure 7. Using the selection tool (S) to select a part of a JMP report. Edit > Save Selection As to save the piece that has been selected to a vector image.
- This creates a resulting file that can be transformed to any size, edited after the fact in a program like Illustrator and printed without a loss of clarity or quality. This is still the best practice for things like customer success stories and the JMP Foreword magazine, where we just want to focus on a single graph or component of a JMP report. See Fig 8.
Figure 8. Crop from a .emf file as viewed at 250% in Adobe Illustrator.
I should note that the .emf files aren't always WYSIWYG, and if you find that there are issues with the resulting JMP reports or graphs, it is important to report these as defects so that they can be fixed.
--------------------------------
Color considerations.
- For two-color screenshots, pick blue and orange to match the look and feel of the JMP website. Fig. 9 shows this.
Figure 9. Blue and orange JMP colors being used for graphs, which have 2 colors.
- Avoid spectral color schemes. For maps, please refer to http://colorbrewer2.org for suggestions of additional colors based on the data that you are trying to portray. If data is sequential with no clear middle, use a sequential color scheme. The White to Blue scheme in the Gradient Settings works well for this and matches much of the JMP website. See Fig. 10.
Figure 10. How to customize color theme.
- If data is divergent in nature, please do not use a spectral color scheme. Use one of the diverging color schemes from JMP (Blue to Grey to Red, for example) or select one from http://colorbrewer2.org. If you want to add a custom color theme that uses blue to gray to orange, add that in the Custom option in the Gradient Settings. You can start from the Blue to Grey to Red and change the red color to orange to match the JMP website colors.
- Other best practices:
- Limit unnecessary decimal places in figure legends.
- Center Graph Builder titles by double-clicking in the graph title and adding empty spaces. Titles should be centered above the graph.
- Limit unnecessary words in titles, axis labels and legends.
- Graph Builder gradient legends should be oriented highest to lowest in values. This may require reversing the scales and colors.
- Limit unnecessary report options for limited visual clutter and complexity.
This is not made to be a definitive guide, but rather a quick start to make sure we are getting the highest quality graphics out of JMP. This is also not a guide to effective data visualization. The mechanics of capturing high quality screenshots and creating good data visualizations are completely separate topics. Comments and suggestions are welcome on this guide. I plan on trying to keep this up to date, and if I make any changes to my workflow, I'll reflect those changes here. Please follow this document if you want to be automatically updated of changes.
Resources for more information:
