Neopets’ #1 Screenie Guide! by braikuvdawn

Intro­duc­tion

Let’s say you’re wan­der­ing around Neopia when all of a sud­den Some­thing Has Hap­pened!, or you find a lab map piece for 1NP on the wiz, or some­one says some­thing funny on the boards. What­ever the case may be, you want to save and cher­ish the moment for­ever… but how? You can do that with some­thing called a screenie!

What is a Screenie?

A scree­nie, screen­shot, screen­cap, screen pic­ture, what­ever you want to call it, is basi­cally just that. It’s a pic­ture of your screen. They’re used on Neopets to cap­ture good events like get­ting an avatar, funny boards, restock­ing, shop wiz finds, etc. If you would like to see some exam­ples you can check out my scree­nies by click­ing the image below.

How to Take a Screenie

The first thing you need to do is to locate the Print Screen/SysRq or Prnt Scrn but­ton on your key­board. It’s usu­ally loa­cated in this area:

Okay. Found it? It should be in that region of the key­board. Okay now that you have that down, let’s actu­ally take a scree­nie. When you find some­thing that you want to take a scree­nie of, you sim­ply press that key. Too easy? Yeah, it is. It won’t make any spe­cial noises when you press it. No pop up win­dow is going to alert you that you’ve copied your screen. It’s com­pa­ra­ble to select­ing some text and hit­ting Ctrl C. Noth­ing is going to hap­pen visu­ally except that the pointer on the mouse might dis­ap­pear from the screen for an instant. Con­grat­u­la­tions! You’ve cap­tured your screen!

What to Do with the Scree­nie Once You’ve Taken It

So your screen is copied. Now you go into an edit­ing pro­gram (I use the reg­u­lar Paint pro­gram under the Start Menu and Accessories).

When that pro­gram is opened you push Ctrl V or go to Edit and Paste. Your whole screen should be pasted into there. If noth­ing hap­pens then go back and push Print Screen again where you wanted to. This is what it would look like inside of your Paint screen (your image will be in there, of course):

Edit­ing (and Saving)

Now it’s time to edit your scree­nie! First, you want to ‘crop’ your pic­ture. Crop­ping just means cut­ting out the image you want from the whole screen pic­ture. To do this, you use the tool in the upper right hand cor­ner of the tool palette. It looks like a dashed rectangle.

Now you select what you want

and push Ctrl X or Edit/Cut.

Then push Ctrl N (File New) for a new screen (don’t save changes to unti­tled) and Ctrl V (Edit Paste) in the new screen to paste your selection.

NOTE: This is very impor­tant!! Make sure that when you paste your scree­nie into the new win­dow to take out all of the extra space around it! You can drag the boxes on the cor­ners of that gray area to make it as big or small as you like.

You want this:

There you can add text, wipe out a name, edit the pic­ture, what­ever you want! Oh yes. If you’re going to use text in your scree­nie, make sure that you use the trans­par­ent back­ground for the text box. It’s the 2nd option under­neath all of the tools. It makes the text look bet­ter on the screenie.

Here’s my ver­sion of that screenie:

Sav­ing

Push Ctrl S (File Save) to save your work of art. I save all of my images as .png files now and it seems to work very nicely, so when the win­dow pops up for sav­ing instruc­tions, put a name on your pic­ture and on the bot­tom of the win­dow it will say Save as type: I sug­gest the PNG. If you can’t use PNG (if you only have BMP as an option) then I sug­gest using a dif­fer­ent image host­ing site. The alter­nate site that I use is yoxio.com, but there are oth­ers such as imageshack.us, imgspot.com, and myfilestash.com.

If you want to change the file type:

You have to resave your image. First open your image into paint or what­ever image edit­ing pro­gram you choose to use. Once you’ve opened it go to File/Save As. A win­dow should pop up that looks some­thing like this (on Paint):

You can save it as the same file name, just change the type. I still sug­gest using PNG because the qual­ity is bet­ter. Once it is saved, though, you have to reu­pload it to Pho­to­bucket (or wher­ever) and repaste the tag onto your site. It’s a has­sle, I know, but it’s the only way.

Edit­ing Tools

To go into more depth about what you can do to your scree­nies, I’m pro­vid­ing a descrip­tion of the tools you can use and why you would pos­si­bly need to use them! ^_^

Okay, this is the tool­bar that Paint has and what my expla­na­tions go off of.

I’m going to explain all of the main tools used for scree­nie mak­ing and how you use them.

Selec­tion Tool

First of all comes that selec­tion tool I talked about earlier.

You use it to select the part of the scree­nie that you want to keep. You don’t really want the extra stuff around it because first of all the file will be too big to do any good, and sec­ond of all it would take up a lot of space on your scree­nie page and no one wants to see a messy scree­nie page!

Eraser

I would only pre­fer to use the eraser when you have to erase text from a white back­ground. For exam­ple, eras­ing names from the neoboard topics.

If I were to erase names from the actual top­ics on the neoboards or from neo­mails I would do it a dif­fer­ent way, and I’ll show that now.

Pick Color Tool/Paint Brush Tool

This is the com­bi­na­tion of tools that I use to erase names and such. It makes the eras­ing job so much neater! What you do is you click on the tool and you click on what­ever color you want to use to erase with (usu­ally the color around it). Then you click on the lit­tle paint brush

and paint over the name or what­ever. Here’s my exam­ple for you:

And please, don’t use the paint brush for more than that. You prob­a­bly won’t need it. If you acci­den­tally erase some­thing with the reg­u­lar eraser, don’t worry! Just click the pick color tool and then the paint bucket tool (right beside the eraser) and fill it in!

Text Tool

This tool is one of the most fre­quently used tools in the art of scree­nie mak­ing. Please use this tool to write words on your scree­nies instead of the paint brush or pen­cil. Those are def­i­nitely a turn off. Any­way, the text tool is used a lot. Usu­ally when you edit your scree­nie, the first thing you put on it is a com­ment. So, all you have to do is click on the tool and click and drag on your scree­nie how big of a text box you want. As I said before, make sure that the 2nd option under­neath the tool­bar is high­lighted because it makes the text on the scree­nie look a lot better.

Here’s my exam­ple of that:

The next thing you can do is change what color you want your text to be. At the bot­tom of the Paint win­dow there is a box with a bunch of col­ors in it. You can pick what color you want from there.

After you pick the color you can choose what font you want it to be so you can click in your text box and a menu will pop up on the screen and you can choose what font you want from there!

When you’re done with your text you can just click off of the text box. Be care­ful, though, because after you click off of it you can’t edit your text again unless you erase it. If you wanted to change it your best bet would be to erase what you have there and make a whole new text box.

Line Tool

You can use the line tool a cou­ple of ways. You can under­line things with it to make them stand out and you can draw arrows with it. Those are the two things that come to mind when I think of using the line tool. All you have to do to use it is click on the tool and then click and drag it to make a line. Hold the Shift key down to make a straight line. Woo! It wasn’t that hard! Here’s an exam­ple of why you would want to use the line tool for arrows instead of the paint tool:

It’s obvi­ously much neater. You can also pick how thick you want the line. When you select the line tool, this lit­tle thing will pop up under­neath all of the other reg­u­lar tools. You just pick how thick you want your line.

I used two dif­fer­ent thick­nesses in the exam­ple up there.

Rec­tan­gle Tool/Oval Tool

I use these tools almost as much as I use the text tool. I’ve used the rec­tan­gle tool in the tuto­r­ial many times, includ­ing putting a box around what tool I’m talk­ing about. As you can see, it’s very use­ful. You use these much like the font and line tools. You can pick what color you want and how thick the box is. You just click and drag how big you want the box or oval to be and around what. You can’t move it once you put it there, so if you mess up, just pull the Ctrl Z trick (edit undo). When you click on the tool 3 options will appear under­neath all of the reg­u­lar buttons.

I always use the top option because that doesn’t cover up any­thing. Here are exam­ples of each:

The oval tool is the same exact way.

Upload­ing

Now that you have your image saved you can upload it to the inter­net! To do that, get an account with a free image host­ing site. That means that you can take the files on your com­puter (mostly images) and upload them onto that site. Then you can copy the URL for them and use them on the inter­net! I use Pho­to­bucket and yoxio. com now. I don’t like yoxio as much, but oh well. Pho­to­bucket hasn’t given me any prob­lems (except with band­width. If you exceed your band­width that means that too many peo­ple have looked at your images and they’re going to shut down your images for the rest of the month). So you get a free account on Pho­to­bucket (or wherever).

Then make a new sub­al­bum and then you can upload pictures.

When you’re ready to do that, click the browse but­ton beside the lit­tle text box.

Then you click on the image that you want.

Then you upload it!

Putting Your Image on a Site

Now that you have your image on Pho­to­bucket, you can copy the sec­ond code (the one with the less than and greater signs around it) onto a web page. To do that, you sim­ply copy that code and paste it wher­ever you want it to go!

For instance if you want to put it on a pet page you go to Pet Cen­tral on the left

and then click on Pet’s Page (the icon with the Lupe)

and then edit!

If you want to cre­ate a whole new page by your­self then delete EVERYTHING in that box! That way you can paste your code into it!

Spe­cial Requested HTML

Well, I’ve had an exces­sive amount of neo­mail and boards ask­ing me how you do some spe­cial HTML things. To answer your ques­tions, I will put them in here!!

But­tons

Now that you have scree­nies you want to make a but­ton to link back to them right? Mak­ing a but­ton is just about the same as mak­ing a scree­nie, except you make the whole thing using paint (or whichever pro­gram you use). You make it, save it as PNG prefer­ably, and upload it. All you really have to do is to link it. Here’s my example:

If you want it to link with­out the lit­tle blue bor­der around it, then put border=0 right after your url in the img tag.

Page Jumps

First is the “link thing”. It’s basi­cally when you click on a link and it takes you to a cer­tain point on the page. Here’s my lit­tle exam­ple of what I’m talk­ing about:

First you start out with the text (or pic­ture, just put an image there instead of the text) that you want to link. Say you have some­thing like what I have.

Okay so you have your text that you want to link. First you have to cre­ate a link there that will link to some­where on the page. Don’t worry about that 2nd part yet. So cre­at­ing a link you start by your reg­u­lar img src tag and link it to where it will go. NOTE: DO NOT USE THE WORD “LINK” IN YOUR ACTUAL LINK!! It will delete stuff with the blocked thing. Here’s my example:

So now you have the first part fin­ished. All you have to do is link it down to where it will go when you click on it. So in front of the text or image that you want the link to jump to you put this:

You’re done! This is what my links sec­tion looks like:

Click here to see image

Scroll Boxes

If you were won­der­ing how I got the scroll boxes around my scree­nies, this sec­tion will answer your ques­tion! Here’s my exam­ple to show you!

Click here to see image

Here’s the actual text for it if you would like to copy and paste it:

<center><div style=“width:700; height:500; over­flow: auto;
background-color: trans­par­ent;
border-color: black;
border-style: solid;
border-top-width: 0px;
border-right-width: 0px;
border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-left-width: 0px;”>
<center><br><font face=arial><font color=black>

TEXT/PICTURES TEXT/PICTURES

</center></div>

Text Boxes

If you look at anyone’s “link back to me” sec­tion you will see that they have a code in a lit­tle box. Many of you have asked me how to make this, so here’s the code. It’s very simple:

Here’s the actual text for it if you would like to copy and paste it:

<center><*TEXTAREA* *rows=5 cols=5>

text­text­text­text

<*/TEXTAREA*> (delete this and the *)

Tips from Other Scree­nie Makers

Orga­ni­za­tion is usu­ally a key fac­tor in how well your page looks. If your scree­nies are orga­nized well they look bet­ter and peo­ple will want to read them.

BE ORGANIZED! ~raizen_jorad

To make a screen­shot on mac, you need to open up the Grab­ber pro­gram, and choose the “cap­tion screen” option in the menu. then the rest is the same (the copy & past­ing and such). ~superwoman_12517

Use proper Eng­lish, unless it’s sar­casm to make the scree­nie funny. ~xx_dream
Exam­ple by shippougirl5: d0nT tYp3 lYk TiS oN YeR sC33n3S!

Take it easy with the Neoboard scree­nies. ~superwoman_12517

Don’t use a scree­nie that every­one else has like the asparagus/cheat search. Keep it orginal. ~lansing420

Crop your images all the time and cen­ter them. *We don’t want to see the whole screen!* ~lansing420

NEVER use a super extra bright color. It hurts the eyes. ~shippougirl5

Make sure the font is read­able with the back­ground you chose. ~meridancer

No huge fonts. ~xx_dream

No music on the page! It dri­ves me nuts! Or loud, ani­mated back­grounds. ~xx_dream

NEVER TAKE SCREENIES OF PEOPLE THAT RATE YOUR SCREENIES BADLY!! ~shippougirl5

No scrib­bling all over the scree­nies! ~xx_dream

Dont only take scree­nies of peo­ple say­ing “cheese, super mega creamy cheese, ect” ~shippougirl5

The fake events can be annoy­ing too (the ones the per­son made, that didnt actu­ally hap­pen). *I most cer­tainly agree* ~xx_dream

Only put scree­nie stuff on one page. Avatar lists and stuff are annoy­ing. Put them on sep­a­rate pages. ~xx_dream

Scree­nies take time. Don’t try to get a mil­lion in one day because then they won’t be as good. Try to get some good ones.

PEOPLE WHO GET OTHERS TO POSE FOR SCREENIES [is bad] ~xx_dream

Pounce on every board with ze word “scree­nies” and try to be linked by as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. ~raizen_jorad

Take time to reply to every nm (neo­mail). ~raizen_jorad

Its never bad to reply to all of both good and bad com­ments about your scree­nies. Ask them why they dont like it. ~sandheep

Don’t ever think your scree­nies are the best. There is never a per­fect scree­nie page. ~sandheep

Actu­ally put com­ments on your scree­nies. It’s bor­ing to see blank scree­nies. ~golfergirl580

Don’t have too many awards on your scree­nie page. Try to move some or all of your awards to another page. Peo­ple are here to see the scree­nies, not lots of awards. ~meridancer

It’s always nice to have a back­ground for your page, but don’t make it too dis­tract­ing and bright. Peo­ple will turn away from your scree­nies because the back­ground attracts too much atten­tion. — braiku­vdawn