shotshadows – Quick Script to Enable or Disable Screenshot Shadows
July 29, 2008 3 Comments
If you’ve taken screenshots of windows in Tiger and Leopard using the command-shift-4+space trick, you’ll have noticed that Leopard will include the window’s (rather large) drop shadows in the resulting image. Depending on your point of view this can be good, bad, or a mixed blessing. I’m in the latter camp. They can be nice for blog posts, but if you’re creating documentation, for example, they can take up precious space on the page.
Using this hint as a starting point, I wrote the following bash script to make the process of disabling and enabling those shadows quick and painless:
Save this script as shotshadows — or download it here — make it executable, and drop it somewhere in your path. (I use /usr/local/bin.) Now you can turn screenshot shadows on and off with the simple terminal commands shotshadows on and shotshadows off. The change takes effect instantly.
…make it executable… How?
Open the Terminal, type ‘chmod u+x ‘ (with the space after x), then drag and drop the script into the Terminal window, then hit enter.
Thanks a lot for this! Really great stuff, you’ve just saved me quite a bit of work in removing unwanted shadows :)