Taking consistent screenshots is hard

[Paul Sladen]

Current ways are (for the time):

    gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime custom-time-format "12:04"
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file:///usr/share/backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png'

But this messes up your settings. Perhaps there's a better way. The ideal would to be able to seamlessly drop in-and-out of "default screenshot mode" at any point with just a simple:

  gsettings set com.ubuntu.handy screenshot-mode true

or GUI tickbox to do the same.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Technology demo only:

  sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

  gsettings set com.ubuntu.handy screenshot-mode true
  killall /usr/local/lib/unity/unity-panel-service /usr/lib/indicator-session/indicator-session-service /usr/lib/indicator-datetime/indicator-datetime-service ; sleep 1 ; /usr/local/lib/unity/unity-panel-service

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Indicator area with 'screenshot-mode true' set.

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

As well as gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime custom-time-format "12:04" you also need gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime time-format “custom”

[James Willock (james-willock)]

To take consistent screenshots, the user needs the following:

* User account set to "Lola Chang"
* Current time set to release (12:04)
* Status indicators (WiFi, Battery, etc) set to maximum
* Background set to release default
* Limited to default application in Launcher

[James Willock (james-willock)]

"Lola Chang" is the persona used for the mainstream consumer audience. The communications team are working to flesh out alternate personas for business and enterprise audiences, so it would be necessary to be able to switch between these in the future when they have been properly defined.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

I reckon we can actually do most of that with a non-invasive shell-script. It might not be as smooth turning things on and off, but off the top of my head:

  * Username: Can be do with 'chfn -f' or policy-key equivalent
  * Datetime: do-able with Popey's (double) gsettings hack
  * Network: dpkg-divert/override *all* of the network related icons to be wifi-max
  * Battery: dpkg-divert/override *all* of the network related icons to be battery-max
  * Background: gsettings overwrite org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri
  * Launcher: gsettings overwrite com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites

It would significantly hackish, but we could knock a shell-script/mini-package that uses dpkg-divert up before 12.04 LTS release.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

The battery applet also probably needs:

  com.canonical.indicator.power show-time false

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

For screenshots we want to turn off sub-pixel anti-aliasing too; as unless the target monitor matches exactly at 1:1 scale the result has banding and colour fringing:

  gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing grayscale

vs the default of:

  gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing rgba

[Emily Maher (emily-maher)]

Re. comment #4: the bin also needs to be empty.

Also, have spoken to Sladen about how it would be really useful to have these set-up steps integrated into the screencasting script in some way so they do not all have to be made manually.

[David Planella (dpm)]

You might also want to consider disabling the automatic crash dialog, so it does not pop up in the middle of a screencast or screenshot if something goes wrong.

You can do it by editing its configuration file on the terminal, by running the following command and changing the 'enabled=1' line to 'enabled=0'

sudo nano /etc/default/apport

Alternatively, if you're comfortable with running the 'sed' utility on the terminal, you can do it in one go by executing:

sudo sed -i -e 's/\(enabled=\)1/\10/' /etc/default/apport

[Tanya Edwards (tanya-edwards)]

David,
13.04 release upon us. Was this shell script ever written for this? It would be really helpful if I could set-up the laptop with the Lola username, datetime, network, battery, launcher. Saves us photoshopping it everytime for every image.
Thanks,
Tanya