Screen Captures – Keeping It Confidential
Many organizations still actively use so-called legacy systems. The average person recognizes these as the dark (often black) screen and either green or orange bit-mapped letters (raster fonts). These systems are the workhorses or powerhouses that most people do not see today very often but were once the workhorse of business and industry. Today governments (in many countries), the banking industry, telecommunications and the military still rely on these systems. The result is that businesses still need to train on these systems.
Mainframe systems by their nature are very expensive. They were expensive to create, maintain and are expensive to operate. Some planners of these systems built development and even training environments. Others thought the entire process was too expensive and skipped training and simply created development environments.
Today organizations are presented with a need to train learners remotely. Using live systems is risky at best. One alternative is screen capture software such as Camtasia Studio, Articulate (with Video Encoder) and Adobe Captivate.
Those who work with screen capture software understand the complexities in using it. Those who do not use it on a day in or day out basis may not recognize both their benefits and its intrinsic limitations.
One challenge facing those who capture the data is that a training environment may not be available. The result is that two choices must be made – capture from a live system or find another solution of some kind.
Capturing live data requires “scrubbing”. Scrubbing, however, presents many problems. On screens from modern web-based applications and even Windows applications the prospects are difficult but not impossible. That is not the case with these legacy systems. We take for granted Adobe True Type fonts. They proliferate applications today – so much so that we forget that twenty years ago these fonts were not even available because Adobe had not yet created them.
Once the data has been captured data scrubbing begins by covering over the offending data. In Adobe Captivate and in Adobe Photoshop one can take other portions of the screen and mask the data fields with “live” data. Then the mask and the actual file are combined until the data is completely replaced. Provided there is no screen variation this is fairly easy to do. Then the challenges begin. Screen capture software takes snapshots at a rate that produces a certain number of screens per second. A copy and paste technique can be used to make things easier and shorten development time.
The real challenge though, is the font. The legacy system font is bit-mapped. Furthermore, the size of the font once the screen is captured may not equate to standard font sizes. So assume the font was 11 or 12 point font when the screen was captured. Depending upon the screen the developer may or may not be able to match the font. Finding a bit mapped font that is the right shade of green is a huge challenge. It is possible to develop the bit-mapped font, but then all the characters that might be used would need to be developed.
Copying and pasting individual characters is simply not realistic. The results will not be realistic enough to be considered professional. Screens that use any font that can be rendered, especially TrueType fonts, will not be realistic. These are the dominant fonts in use in most technology today.
Recent research based on various keyword searches using the Google search engine resulted in no solutions to this problem using the tools at hand.
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