Like other commenters point out, automatic OCR on Apple platforms is a godsend, and it's such a great use of our modern AI capabilities that it should be a standard feature in every document viewer on every platform.
Another thing I wish was more common is metadata in screenshots, especially on phones. Eg if I take a screenshot of a picture in Instagram, I wish a URL of the picture was embedded (eg instagram.com/p/ABCD1234/). If I take a screenshot in the browser, include the URL that's being viewed (+ path to the DOM element in the viewport). If I take a screenshot in a maps app, include the bounding coordinates. If I take a screenshot in a PDF viewer, include a SHA1 hash of the document being viewed + offset in the document so that if I send the screenshot to someone else with the same document, it can seamlessly link to it. Etc etc.
There are probably privacy concerns to solve here, but no idea is new in computer science and I'm pretty sure some grad student somewhere has already explored the topic in depth (it just never made it to mainstream computing platforms).
It feels like screenshots have become the de facto common denominator in our mobile computing era, since platforms have abstracted files away from us. Lots of people who have only ever used phones as their main computing devices are confused when it comes to files, but everyone seems to understand screenshots.
OCR is a godsend, 100% agree. Not a fan of the metadata idea personally, 'screenshotting' is done by the operating system, and exposing ways to allow apps to know that they were 'in' the screenshot plus expose some metadata of their choosing (like your examples of GPS coordinates for a maps app, url for browser) sounds like a privacy nightmare, and like something that will make a very reliable core feature much harder to use.
There are companies like Evernote/Zight/CloudApp that at one point tried some things like this, but they never really caught - I think because it's pretty easy to add annotations yourself or some note of your own - and a screenshot not "trying to do everything" is part of what makes them useful & ubiquitous.
But apps (most notably Snapchat comes to mind) have been doing exactly that analysis though. Theoretically they could then [offer to] edit the photo immediately afterwards to add context, since they had access to the photo roll or files
https://android.stackexchange.com/a/119767
> 'screenshotting' is done by the operating system, and exposing ways to allow apps to know that they were 'in' the screenshot plus expose some metadata of their choosing sounds like a privacy nightmare
The apps don't have to know a screenshot was taken for this feature to exist; they could write into a passive "in case a screenshot is taken, use this as metadata" object data field that the OS uses when the user takes a screenshot
deep linking allows apps to know/intercept known URLs and do "things". I don't know if the screenshot mechanism would involve this.
I do know that some things cannot be screenshotted. On macs this is any HDCP image on the screen (shows up as a blank rectangle). On android I believe some apps cannot be captured in a screenshot. Don't know about ios.
OP here. You raised a point that I should have mentioned in the article: screenshots of web pages that don't include the URL. I'm perfectly fine with screenshots of browser windows, since the context is almost always relevant. The system I work on right now puts a lot of useful context into the URL, but it's almost never included in the initial screenshot, so I have to ask for that. Of course, I generally ask for it as text so that I don't have to try to type the whole thing without making a mistake.
I was content to write the original off as "to each his own", but this one I feel you on.
Maybe the problem is sharing without caring and/or without being aware.
Case in point, folks capture large blocks of text as you mentioned and paste it into slack which converts certain characters unless included in a code block. This can be much worse than sharing a screenshot.
Please know the best way to share what you are sharing when you share. I've had to come to expect this request will not be honored.
I also might be guilty of not honoring sharing with caring myself. For example, I didn't read this entire thread before posting; others may have made this exact point already.
> It feels like screenshots have become the de facto common denominator in our mobile computing era,
Google/Apple have taken notice. Both have recently redone their full-screen post-screenshot UI to include AI insights / automatic product searches / direct chat with Gemini/LLM / etc.
Its true everyone uses screenshots to save things they are interested in or want to look up / search more of / save for reason and this UI is the perfect place to insert themselves.
Why? Either it's public content, and it can be traced back manually anyways (screenshots from social media posts typically include the username), or it's private content and knowing the URL slug doesn't change anything (the fact that you're sharing a screenshot of private content is the privacy breach, not the fact that some UUID is embedded).
Why spend electricity and time to read the text in a screenshot, and then more time making sure there are no mistakes. When the sender could have just copied the original text?
Interesting idea, but I think this understates how often screenshots are "slightly adversarial". I'm taking a screenshot because the app or webpage has deliberately made it hard to select text for some reason. Or the UI is just annoying about selection (e.g. trying to select the text from a link anchor without being considered as having clicked on it, which is fiddly on Android).
Then there's the question of fully adversarial screenshots. I can definitely see why people want "I want to send this to someone and discourage them from seamlessly resharing it", but at the same time: it's my screen. Not generally a problem on desktops unless you're dealing with video content.
I disagree. I use screenshots all the time, because it:
- Preserves the full 80 character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability
- Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
- Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end
- Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful
Obviously if somebody needs a whole file or whole log, then send the whole thing as an attachment. But very often I'll still include a screenshot of the relevant part. With line numbers, it's not difficult to jump to the right part of the attached file.
Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
Key things required for posting to the chat: people reading can read it, people reading can copy and paste it, and people searching can actually find it. It doesn't need to exactly match what you might see in a text editor. Anybody wanting to look at the actual text in context won't be doing it in the chat, but will rather be opening the file of interest in the appropriate tool, and examining it that way; anybody stuck reading the text only in the chat is probably on their phone or something and will be best served by being able to easily see all of it.
For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it. It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation). Also bear in mind that even the most basic of font and colour choices (large/small font, dark/light mode) can cause accessibility issues for some readers.
For copying and pasting purposes, images suck. Yes, macOS can do it, sort of, and I expect Windows 11 can do it too, probably to about the same extent. But it's not as easy as having the text right there in copyable form.
For searching purposes, ditto - only worse, because at least when you copy and paste and it comes out wrong, you'll notice. When you search: you just won't find the thing. You'll never know.
Which is why screenshots help, for the reasons I gave
> people reading can copy and paste it
Why? If there's something like a user ID or error code that the person needs as text, I'll paste that separately. Stuff I include in a screenshot is for understanding, not copying and pasting.
> and people searching can actually find it.
Which is what the message text around the screenshot is for. Which actually includes the relevant keywords, not random tabular data or lines of code which just add noise to search.
> Anybody wanting to look at the actual text in context won't be doing it in the chat, but will rather be opening the file of interest in the appropriate tool, and examining it that way;
Except when they aren't/can't. The whole point of screenshots is for when they can't access something easily that way, which happens for a million different reasons.
> anybody stuck reading the text only in the chat is probably on their phone or something and will be best served by being able to easily see all of it.
Which is what images make far easier to read without being messed up.
> For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it.
No it's not. Wrapping destroys indentation and alignment. It's not "so be it", it goes from readable to literally unreadable. I can't change the width of my phone or a lot of viewing areas. I can always scroll an image horizontally though.
> It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation).
Which is why zooming and panning exist. I don't know where you're getting something silly like 3713 pixels though. But if that's the width of some massive table whose layout needs to be preserved, then so be it.
> - Preserves the full 80-character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability
Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
> - Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font? This points at the rare occasion where there's a problem with the setup, but you could also argue that maybe there's a system with a broken image decompressor.
> Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe? Its awful[^0], but that's more of a GMail problem that could be solved if they wanted.
[^0]: Column width unbounded even on 4k monitors. Weird and inconsistent font sizes across different fonts (monospace is smaller). Reads poorly on phones too.
> Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
For plaintext sure. Not for code or tabular data. It destroys indentation and destroys column alignment and interleaves parts of rows. It's a horrid mess.
> When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font?
When was the last time I have to read something in a font I can't control that is forced to be proportional? Oh, constantly. Literally all the time.
> Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe?
Yes, and messaging clients, and chat clients, and everything unless it has actual dedicated code blocks that render with a horizontal scroll bar. Which are the exception as opposed to the rule.
All of the points are mostly personal and thus should never be forced on anyone else via a screenshot (as a general rule, though depends on the content)
- no line wrapping destroys readability more since you can't toggle it in a screenshot. Imagine that url on the screenshot taking 3 lines instead of 1 and pushing useful text off screen. Also, forcing 80 on a user of a wider monitor is barbaric.
- And if there is no tabular data (and autoformatted code doesn't do tabular code) you've just lost nice proportional text for nothing
- Syntax highlighting as is commonly used (and as is shown in the blog screenshot) is useless, and is anyway unlikely to match reader's convention
> being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
So it can't even be read properly, you have to scroll the screenshot left and right... instead of just reading
100% this. I fully disagree with the post - screenshots show context/colour/formatting etc that often doesn't even translate properly if you DO try to paste it into some IM or other "text swapping" application.
Sure, if you want someone to reproduce the text of course you'd send them actual text. But to show a problem, a picture is, as they say, worth 1000 words.
Most of the time if someone is sending me code as text (which is by far preferable to a screenshot) I'm copying it out and pasting it into my own editor.
That way I get a width appropriate for my screen (which may be different from yours), text that's still aligned correctly, and uses the font of my choosing (which may differ from yours), and still has syntax highlighting (using the sizes/colors/styles that I'm accustomed to).
Sending the whole file (or a link to it) works well too but screenshots are absolutely likely to be some level of annoying for anyone who isn't you no matter how helpful you think you're being.
Forcing someone else to view code the way you like seeing it isn't always going to be completely obnoxious for them (although you might be surprised by what some people find acceptable) but it does make it difficult/impossible to view it the way I like seeing it (in addition to losing the ability to search/edit)
> still has syntax highlighting (using the sizes/colors/styles that I'm accustomed to)
Where I work I find it's usually the youngins using a ridiculous light on dark color scheme that post screenshots of code. Are we still stuck in the '80s? And are they pining for a time they never experienced themselves? Computer hardware has been capable of displaying the more civilized and easier-on-the-eyes dark on light color schemes since then.
This isn't about sending 300 lines of code in a screenshot or something.
This is about, "hey, look at these 6 lines which is where I think the problem might be". It's not for pasting in a separate editor, why would you do that? It's about providing quick context even if you're on your phone.
If you want to go inspect that spot in the file once you're back at your computer then go do that. The screenshot is to save you time because often you can answer just based on it.
I think slack and other mail/chat clients rescale the image and apply aggressive compression on it. Sometimes they even crop the image or make it so that you need to scroll left and right. Also your syntax highlighting might be annoying to others and might make legibility worse for the receiver, and as other people pointed out most chat/mail clients support monospace code blocks. Plus I agree with all the things that the blog post author pointed out.
> or make it so that you need to scroll left and right
That's the point.
If have an ASCII table that is 150 character columns wide, I'm sending you a screenshot so that you can scroll left and right, rather than have everything end up in a jumble of interleaved overflowing lines that turn into unreadable spaghetti.
This is a feature, not a bug. Not everyone is opening the message on a full-width monitor.
My only use of code screenshot is to emulate the "take a look at my screen workflow". It's only meant for the other person to take a quick glance at. Anything further than that is transmitted as a code block or text file.
Yeah. OP has an egocentric bias - it’s not the norm in the world of work sharing that you can faithfully reproduce the live/contextual environment of the sender given the raw string.
(OP’s blog purports to be pertinent to freelance software development).
> Preserves the full 80 character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability
How line wrapping interacts with readability is for the reader software to worry about, not the control-freak author. Line length higher than the device width can handle can be even worse for readability than lines wrapped in the wrong places. It's one of the reasons I loathe PDFs.
> Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end
If the reader wants to have their code in hairline-width Courier, that's their right. It's not for the control-freak with awful taste in fonts to decide.
> Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful
Forces a particular style of syntax highlighting upon the reader without giving them an easy recourse to change it. No thanks.
> Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
The closest thing to a decent argument. Except pretty much any text input that accepts embedded images will usually also provide a monospace formatting option, so there is no need to screenshot text here either.
It also allows drawing on top. I find it convenient to screenshot / take picture of some code / error log / terminal output then circle some bit, draw some arrows, or do other types of drawings to draw attention to things.
Emphasizing bits on code-formatted text is not as straightforward and would typically be ambiguous (was this punctuation meant for emphasis or was it part of the original text?).
Pictures are also quick to make and grasp, which is a plus when having to quickly diagnose something with others.
The main complaint in the article about having to type into a search bar instead of copying and pasting doesn't make sense. It's like a word or two at most which you'd have to search. It might even be faster to type than to copy and paste (moving cursor around, etc.).
The error log complaint would also be valid had it been text instead of a screenshot. That was a problem of not sharing enough context, not the format of the message.
It's not widely supported. It's not in e-mail or SMS or Gmail or Docs or Word or a hundred other pieces of software where I communicate.
Yes, I use that wherever it exists. It's great, and you're lucky when it's there. I wish it was everywhere. But as long as it's not, for everything else, there's screenshots.
I feel like I've seen good solutions to both problems before, aren't there vscode extensions that let you just select the code and create a sharable link with all the view type options to appear everyone?
Except it doesn't use my preferred font, not my don't size, not my colors and I can't copy parts of it as easily and then the stupid chat app scales the image for some reason ot another.
The ability to highlight/copy/etc text on Macs/iOS these days is such a killer feature. I use it almost every day, both for copying/translating text in screenshots or taking photos of text to then copy it into my notes later (eg school notice boards or event posters etc).
Yup - I recall when this feature was released, maybe a dozen years ago, with KDEConnect. Real QoL improvement. Glad to hear some other OS's are catching up.
It gave me a "living in the future" feeling the day someone sent me a picture of a phone number through imessage. Barely thinking, I pressed on the phone number in the image and I was prompted to call it. It was like technology and primitive intuition teamed up to create that moment.
Part of what makes it so good is that it's everywhere. Preview, QuickLook, QuickTime Player (yes, videos get OCR'd too!), any app that uses the system frameworks for displaying media.
This includes Safari, where not only do images (inline or otherwise) have selectable text, but the built in translator leverages that text and uses it to translate images, too! This is super useful for translating Japanese webpages in particular, which tend to have tons of text baked into images.
I have Shottr keyboard shortcut (cmd+opt+control+o) setup to allow me to OCR from whatever is on the screen and copy the text to clipboard.
So whether someone shares code or error log as screenshot on slack, it’s 3 steps: 1. cmd+opt+control+o 2. select the area to OCR 3. cmd+v in vscode or google
Screenshots of text! Luxury! In my day, the screenshots were embedded in a Word document too.
But I can't be the only one appalled at the suggestion to use an LLM to parse the text. The sheer, prodigious waste of computing power, just to round-trip text to an image and back to text, when what's really missing is a computer user interface that makes it as simple to send text or other snippets as it is to send screenshots.
It can get worse. People use their phones to send a literal photo of their screen. This happens almost daily in one of the programming discords I'm member of and it drives me crazy, these are supposed to be (future) programmers and they don't even know how to make a proper screenshot??
I knew an enterprise where Word documents were used as "folders" for Word documents. The "top" document would have a collection of files pasted in to them (the actual file objects, not just the file content).
Pretty much every new programmer I’ve ever hired has done this in their first few weeks. Every time I have to tell them why it’s so unhelpful to share screenshots of text instead of just pasting the text. Usually they learn. When they don’t I usually end up firing them, not for that reason but for others.
The reason I personally hate it is I am often working from my phone. And it’s much easier to read text rendered properly than pinch zooming text in an image. What’s worse is slack will downgrade images for mobile and you can’t even pinch zoom in fully.
My preference -- Link or attachment to the full document or code in context (if needed) ... along with screenshot of a relevant portion. (Many times the former is optional because there is enough context already.)
It is extra work to do both but I like to be through even when asking for help. Even if the other side doesn't need it -- because I myself might not remember all the nuances when I refer to that conversation later.
Also screenshot preserves (before any fixes) the exact way things looked when I confronted a certain situation. The visual of the screenshot serves as a much stronger reminder of that situation and my thinking ...way better than mere copy pasted text.
Thing is, screenshots are fast, and the same technique works across every app. If you work in a field where you might be filing trouble reports from web app A, native app B, website C,... its just easier to use the same technique across the board. Win+S or CMD Shift 4, and move on with your life.
Not nice for the recipient maybe, but hella efficient for everyone else, and there are many more people in the latter camp than the former.
Readit News
Another thing I wish was more common is metadata in screenshots, especially on phones. Eg if I take a screenshot of a picture in Instagram, I wish a URL of the picture was embedded (eg instagram.com/p/ABCD1234/). If I take a screenshot in the browser, include the URL that's being viewed (+ path to the DOM element in the viewport). If I take a screenshot in a maps app, include the bounding coordinates. If I take a screenshot in a PDF viewer, include a SHA1 hash of the document being viewed + offset in the document so that if I send the screenshot to someone else with the same document, it can seamlessly link to it. Etc etc.
There are probably privacy concerns to solve here, but no idea is new in computer science and I'm pretty sure some grad student somewhere has already explored the topic in depth (it just never made it to mainstream computing platforms).
It feels like screenshots have become the de facto common denominator in our mobile computing era, since platforms have abstracted files away from us. Lots of people who have only ever used phones as their main computing devices are confused when it comes to files, but everyone seems to understand screenshots.
Also, necessary shout out to Screenshot Conf! https://screenshot.arquipelago.org
There are companies like Evernote/Zight/CloudApp that at one point tried some things like this, but they never really caught - I think because it's pretty easy to add annotations yourself or some note of your own - and a screenshot not "trying to do everything" is part of what makes them useful & ubiquitous.
The apps don't have to know a screenshot was taken for this feature to exist; they could write into a passive "in case a screenshot is taken, use this as metadata" object data field that the OS uses when the user takes a screenshot
deep linking allows apps to know/intercept known URLs and do "things". I don't know if the screenshot mechanism would involve this.
I do know that some things cannot be screenshotted. On macs this is any HDCP image on the screen (shows up as a blank rectangle). On android I believe some apps cannot be captured in a screenshot. Don't know about ios.
Maybe the problem is sharing without caring and/or without being aware.
Case in point, folks capture large blocks of text as you mentioned and paste it into slack which converts certain characters unless included in a code block. This can be much worse than sharing a screenshot.
Please know the best way to share what you are sharing when you share. I've had to come to expect this request will not be honored.
I also might be guilty of not honoring sharing with caring myself. For example, I didn't read this entire thread before posting; others may have made this exact point already.
Google/Apple have taken notice. Both have recently redone their full-screen post-screenshot UI to include AI insights / automatic product searches / direct chat with Gemini/LLM / etc.
Its true everyone uses screenshots to save things they are interested in or want to look up / search more of / save for reason and this UI is the perfect place to insert themselves.
bloody hell of all privacy concerns
It didn't make it in the release version out of fear that people would use MacPaint as a Word Processor.
Interesting idea, but I think this understates how often screenshots are "slightly adversarial". I'm taking a screenshot because the app or webpage has deliberately made it hard to select text for some reason. Or the UI is just annoying about selection (e.g. trying to select the text from a link anchor without being considered as having clicked on it, which is fiddly on Android).
Then there's the question of fully adversarial screenshots. I can definitely see why people want "I want to send this to someone and discourage them from seamlessly resharing it", but at the same time: it's my screen. Not generally a problem on desktops unless you're dealing with video content.
Your OCR isn't going to help you for the missing off-screenshot clipped parts.
- Preserves the full 80 character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability
- Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
- Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end
- Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful
Obviously if somebody needs a whole file or whole log, then send the whole thing as an attachment. But very often I'll still include a screenshot of the relevant part. With line numbers, it's not difficult to jump to the right part of the attached file.
Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it. It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation). Also bear in mind that even the most basic of font and colour choices (large/small font, dark/light mode) can cause accessibility issues for some readers.
For copying and pasting purposes, images suck. Yes, macOS can do it, sort of, and I expect Windows 11 can do it too, probably to about the same extent. But it's not as easy as having the text right there in copyable form.
For searching purposes, ditto - only worse, because at least when you copy and paste and it comes out wrong, you'll notice. When you search: you just won't find the thing. You'll never know.
Which is why screenshots help, for the reasons I gave
> people reading can copy and paste it
Why? If there's something like a user ID or error code that the person needs as text, I'll paste that separately. Stuff I include in a screenshot is for understanding, not copying and pasting.
> and people searching can actually find it.
Which is what the message text around the screenshot is for. Which actually includes the relevant keywords, not random tabular data or lines of code which just add noise to search.
> Anybody wanting to look at the actual text in context won't be doing it in the chat, but will rather be opening the file of interest in the appropriate tool, and examining it that way;
Except when they aren't/can't. The whole point of screenshots is for when they can't access something easily that way, which happens for a million different reasons.
> anybody stuck reading the text only in the chat is probably on their phone or something and will be best served by being able to easily see all of it.
Which is what images make far easier to read without being messed up.
> For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it.
No it's not. Wrapping destroys indentation and alignment. It's not "so be it", it goes from readable to literally unreadable. I can't change the width of my phone or a lot of viewing areas. I can always scroll an image horizontally though.
> It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation).
Which is why zooming and panning exist. I don't know where you're getting something silly like 3713 pixels though. But if that's the width of some massive table whose layout needs to be preserved, then so be it.
Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
> - Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font? This points at the rare occasion where there's a problem with the setup, but you could also argue that maybe there's a system with a broken image decompressor.
> Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe? Its awful[^0], but that's more of a GMail problem that could be solved if they wanted.
[^0]: Column width unbounded even on 4k monitors. Weird and inconsistent font sizes across different fonts (monospace is smaller). Reads poorly on phones too.
For plaintext sure. Not for code or tabular data. It destroys indentation and destroys column alignment and interleaves parts of rows. It's a horrid mess.
> When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font?
When was the last time I have to read something in a font I can't control that is forced to be proportional? Oh, constantly. Literally all the time.
> Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe?
Yes, and messaging clients, and chat clients, and everything unless it has actual dedicated code blocks that render with a horizontal scroll bar. Which are the exception as opposed to the rule.
- no line wrapping destroys readability more since you can't toggle it in a screenshot. Imagine that url on the screenshot taking 3 lines instead of 1 and pushing useful text off screen. Also, forcing 80 on a user of a wider monitor is barbaric.
- And if there is no tabular data (and autoformatted code doesn't do tabular code) you've just lost nice proportional text for nothing
- Syntax highlighting as is commonly used (and as is shown in the blog screenshot) is useless, and is anyway unlikely to match reader's convention
> being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
So it can't even be read properly, you have to scroll the screenshot left and right... instead of just reading
Sure, if you want someone to reproduce the text of course you'd send them actual text. But to show a problem, a picture is, as they say, worth 1000 words.
That way I get a width appropriate for my screen (which may be different from yours), text that's still aligned correctly, and uses the font of my choosing (which may differ from yours), and still has syntax highlighting (using the sizes/colors/styles that I'm accustomed to).
Sending the whole file (or a link to it) works well too but screenshots are absolutely likely to be some level of annoying for anyone who isn't you no matter how helpful you think you're being.
Forcing someone else to view code the way you like seeing it isn't always going to be completely obnoxious for them (although you might be surprised by what some people find acceptable) but it does make it difficult/impossible to view it the way I like seeing it (in addition to losing the ability to search/edit)
Where I work I find it's usually the youngins using a ridiculous light on dark color scheme that post screenshots of code. Are we still stuck in the '80s? And are they pining for a time they never experienced themselves? Computer hardware has been capable of displaying the more civilized and easier-on-the-eyes dark on light color schemes since then.
This is about, "hey, look at these 6 lines which is where I think the problem might be". It's not for pasting in a separate editor, why would you do that? It's about providing quick context even if you're on your phone.
If you want to go inspect that spot in the file once you're back at your computer then go do that. The screenshot is to save you time because often you can answer just based on it.
That's the point.
If have an ASCII table that is 150 character columns wide, I'm sending you a screenshot so that you can scroll left and right, rather than have everything end up in a jumble of interleaved overflowing lines that turn into unreadable spaghetti.
This is a feature, not a bug. Not everyone is opening the message on a full-width monitor.
(OP’s blog purports to be pertinent to freelance software development).
How line wrapping interacts with readability is for the reader software to worry about, not the control-freak author. Line length higher than the device width can handle can be even worse for readability than lines wrapped in the wrong places. It's one of the reasons I loathe PDFs.
> Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end
If the reader wants to have their code in hairline-width Courier, that's their right. It's not for the control-freak with awful taste in fonts to decide.
> Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful
Forces a particular style of syntax highlighting upon the reader without giving them an easy recourse to change it. No thanks.
> Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
The closest thing to a decent argument. Except pretty much any text input that accepts embedded images will usually also provide a monospace formatting option, so there is no need to screenshot text here either.
Emphasizing bits on code-formatted text is not as straightforward and would typically be ambiguous (was this punctuation meant for emphasis or was it part of the original text?).
Pictures are also quick to make and grasp, which is a plus when having to quickly diagnose something with others.
The main complaint in the article about having to type into a search bar instead of copying and pasting doesn't make sense. It's like a word or two at most which you'd have to search. It might even be faster to type than to copy and paste (moving cursor around, etc.).
The error log complaint would also be valid had it been text instead of a screenshot. That was a problem of not sharing enough context, not the format of the message.
Is widely supported to add code. E.g. in Slack, Confluence...
Yes, I use that wherever it exists. It's great, and you're lucky when it's there. I wish it was everywhere. But as long as it's not, for everything else, there's screenshots.
e.g. https://snippetshare.dev/
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Let me introduce you to Putty users who never change the default font...
This includes Safari, where not only do images (inline or otherwise) have selectable text, but the built in translator leverages that text and uses it to translate images, too! This is super useful for translating Japanese webpages in particular, which tend to have tons of text baked into images.
But I can't be the only one appalled at the suggestion to use an LLM to parse the text. The sheer, prodigious waste of computing power, just to round-trip text to an image and back to text, when what's really missing is a computer user interface that makes it as simple to send text or other snippets as it is to send screenshots.
https://xkcd.com/2116/
1. I have ‘rubber duck debugged’ my own question.
2. I checked that this question hasn’t been asked before.
3. I have noted in my message what I’ve tried.
4. I have avoided the ‘XY problem’ by clearly detailing the core problem, X.
5. I have provided specifics of my issue, not vague references or descriptions.
6. I have provided URL links to relevant content, and where possible the URL links are immutable.
7. I have not included screenshots of text in my message.
8. I have not used obscure acronyms or abbreviations.
9. I have formatted my message well, particularly paying attention to code formatting and headings.
10. I have not just said “hi” and waited for a reply.
Like other posters, I don't think Apple OCR is sufficient to make up for screenshotting. The biggest problem is search.
1. https://thundergolfer.com/communication/slack/2021/02/24/how...
Both Spotlight and Photos will find text in screenshots.
The reason I personally hate it is I am often working from my phone. And it’s much easier to read text rendered properly than pinch zooming text in an image. What’s worse is slack will downgrade images for mobile and you can’t even pinch zoom in fully.
It is extra work to do both but I like to be through even when asking for help. Even if the other side doesn't need it -- because I myself might not remember all the nuances when I refer to that conversation later.
Also screenshot preserves (before any fixes) the exact way things looked when I confronted a certain situation. The visual of the screenshot serves as a much stronger reminder of that situation and my thinking ...way better than mere copy pasted text.
Not nice for the recipient maybe, but hella efficient for everyone else, and there are many more people in the latter camp than the former.