How can I get a useful 2D print on my printer.

clayton_ertley

I get that this has been answered but why don't you just use printscreen and paste it into MSPaint or a similar program?
you can crop out the unneeded stuff, save, and print.

andrew_troup

further to clayton's suggestion: In Win7 and Win8, there's an even easier way built in: it's called "Snipping Tool" and it works nicely, saves having to crop and round-trip thru MS Paint (saves a .png or .gif or .jpg directly)

clayton_ertley

andrew_troup I did not know about that tool!!!! Thanks for sharing! You just saved me lots and lots of time!

michael3424

@andrew_troup - Snipping Tool is handy but it doesn't work well unless the window to be "snipped" is on my _secondary_ monitor.  Anybody else have that problem?

clayton_ertley

Only problem I am having is that no matter what shortcut I apply to the snipping tool, It will not work anywhere. For now I have pinned it to my task bar.

3dcad

@michael3424  I'm using snipping a lot in two monitors and have no problems..

The only problem with snipping tool is that the resolution of your image is the same as the resolution of your screen ie. 72 or 96dpi. And the size of the image depends on your monitor resolution, with fullhd (1920x1080) and better you can get decent size prints from screenshots.

To have actual print quality you would need 150+dpi resolution. And if you wan't image size of 5" x 5" that would make 750x750px in 150dpi so it's 1500x1500 in 75dpi and this is the image size (not whole screen size). I think you get the point.

Using print menu for printing or saving png from preview gives you better quality (resolution) than screengrab or snipping tool. But if you just need image for email or other viewing on screen, then snipping tool is very handy.

michael3424

@3dcad Thanks - at least now I know that Snipping Tool can be used with dual monitors.  Something must be amiss with my monitor setup.