Sometimes I want to get a higher resolution screen capture so I can include it in a printed document. Although my monitors are big, if I stretch a window out very large, that doesn't make the text, buttons, or menus bigger. This hint tells you how to scale the window itself, so you get a better screen capture.
Here's the problem: I want a screen capture with as many real, useful pixels in it as possible. If I have a window, say the Eclipse IDE, that looks good when it's, for example, 1000x800 pixels in size, it tends to just fill up with white space if I stretch it out to 1600x1050 (the size of my monitor). Certainly the icons and such don't scale.
If I take a screen capture of the 1000x800 pixel window, and then I scale it using a raster graphics program, the text gets scaled and jaggy, along with the UI elements. For many programs I find it time consuming and annoying to try to change all the fonts and preferences to make the text larger, and even if I do, the UI elements will be out-of-proportion to the text.
Instead I make use of this hint for a different purpose. You'll need to have Xcode installed to do this.
I open Quartz Debug (from /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/) and choose 'UI Resolution' from the Window menu. Then I slide the slider up to 1.25 or maybe 1.5 and stop. Now when I launch the program I want to capture, it is much bigger. Of course, the icons may look a bit blocky and some of the UI elements don't look right around the edges, but I've scaled everything uniformly. The fonts will scale smoothly and most of the UI elements scale smoothly. It has a much better look than going in and changing the text size to 18pt or 24pt, while leaving all the UI elements alone.
So now, when I make the window 1600x1050, I get more information in my screen capture. It looks better when printed. Fonts are scaled up smoothly and everything is in the same ratio as it normally would be.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110421010342143