Focused View: Every Screenshot the Same Size

A screenshot of a full screen holds the one control the reader needs and several thousand pixels of everything else. Focused view crops each step to the area around the click.

With it on, the same step shows the button and enough around it to know where you are.

Folge crops the step when it renders it for export, so the captured file is never touched. Switching focused view off brings the whole screenshot back, and the crop is taken from the original pixels rather than scaled up, so zooming in does not soften anything.

In a PDF or a Word document every step image is scaled to the same column width. Without focused view, a step captured from a 4K browser window and a step captured from a small dialog are shrunk by very different amounts, so the text in one comes out half the size of the text in the next.

Focused view crops instead of shrinking. Folge works the zoom out from the size of the capture, aiming for the same working area on every step, so the content arrives on the page at a comparable size.

Steps captured from the same window are cropped identically, so a guide recorded in one application exports as a set of images that are all the same shape and the same dimensions. The crop keeps the capture's own aspect ratio, so a tall dialog stays tall.

Export two or three steps to PDF and look at them side by side before you record the rest of the guide.

1. Select the step in the list on the left.
2. Click the switch in the Focused view panel above the canvas.Folge centres the frame on the click mark and picks a zoom level for you.

Click it again for the full screenshot. Nothing is lost either way.

The controls appear next to the switch once focused view is on.

• Plus and minus: Zoom in and out in steps of 0.25, between 1 and 5. The number between them is where you are now.
• Hold Space and drag: Moves the frame over the screenshot. The four-arrow icon is the reminder for it, not a button to click.

Zoom and position are stored on the step, so setting one step does not move the frame on any other.

1. Click the guide title at the top of the editor.
2. Open the Other Settings tab.
3. Click Enable or Disable.Folge applies it to every step in the guide, then reloads the editor.

Focused view is already on for steps you capture. The switch is in Settings, on the Application tab, under Focused view for new steps.

Changing it does nothing to guides you have already made. It decides how the next capture starts.

• The layout is the point: If the step is "the filters are down the left-hand side", cropping to the click removes the answer.
• Dashboards and reports: A reader comparing figures across a screen needs the screen.
• Small windows: A dialog that is already the size of the thing it shows gains nothing from being cropped further.

The setting is per step, so leaving it on for the guide and switching it off on the three steps where the whole screen matters is the usual way to work. Those three will export wider than the rest.