The Clippa manual

Short, because the app is. Anything it doesn't answer: support@sugata.com.au.

Capturing

Press Capture (or Ctrl+Shift+C from anywhere) and the screen freezes under a crosshair. From there:

• Drag to capture a region. The size readout follows the selection.
• Click a window to capture exactly that window. It highlights as you hover.
• Esc cancels.

Full screen takes the primary monitor; All screens takes every monitor as one image. The Delay menu gives you time to open the menu you're trying to photograph, and Cursor controls whether the pointer appears.

Every capture is saved to the library, copied to the clipboard, and opened in the editor. Each can be switched off in Settings.

Scrolling capture

For the pages that don't fit on screen. Press Scrolling, then click the window you want, or drag an area inside it. Esc cancels.

Clippa scrolls the window to its end and stitches every viewport into one tall image. It uses real wheel input rather than asking the window politely, so it works on anything a wheel works on: browsers, documents, chat logs, long settings pages, even apps that draw their own scrollbars.

• A floating bar shows how tall the image is getting. Keep your hands off the mouse while it runs, since moving the pointer or the window mid-scroll breaks the alignment.
• Stop ends it early and keeps everything stitched so far, so a page with no bottom (an infinite feed) is still worth capturing.
• It stops on its own at the end of the page, or at 24,000 pixels tall.
• The result lands in the library, on the clipboard and in the editor like any capture.

Worth knowing: sticky headers repeat at the seams, and a stretch of near-blank page can end the capture early, because the stitcher stops when nothing recognisable has moved.

Step capture

Turns a procedure into a numbered guide while you simply do the thing. Press Steps, then work through the task normally.

Every left click becomes a step: a capture of the window you clicked, stamped with a ring showing exactly where the click landed, captioned with that window's name. The capture is taken before the click takes effect, so a step shows the menu you are about to open rather than the one already open.

• The floating bar counts steps as you go. Done builds the guide; Cancel throws it away.
• Clicks on Clippa's own windows are never counted, since operating the tool is not a step.
• Up to 50 steps, which is longer than any procedure anyone will read.
• The guide comes out as one tall PNG, numbered and captioned, so it can be pasted straight into a wiki, a ticket, an email or a chat with no document format in the way.
• It arrives like any other capture, so you can annotate it in the editor before sending it.

The editor

Tools left to right: select and move (V), arrow (A), line (L), rectangle (R), ellipse (E), pen (P), highlighter (H), text (T), callout (C), step number (N), blur (B), crop (X).

• Pick a colour and stroke size from the toolbar; they apply to new marks and to the selected one.
• Double-click a text or callout to edit it. Delete removes the selected mark.
• Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Y undo and redo everything, crops included.
• Blur hides what's underneath. It recomputes if you move it, so it can never be "lifted" off the export.
• Step numbers count up on their own: click, click, click gives 1, 2, 3.
• Grab text runs Windows' own OCR over the capture and hands you the text.
• Ctrl+C copies the finished image; Ctrl+S saves it. Zoom with Ctrl+wheel or the slider.

Recording

Press Record (or Ctrl+Shift+R), pick the area the same way as a capture, and a red frame marks what's being taken. The little bar shows the elapsed time; Stop saves, Cancel discards. The hotkey stops a running recording too.

Format (MP4 or animated GIF) and frame rate live in Settings. MP4 is encoded by Windows' own H.264 encoder; GIFs get a proper per-frame palette.

The video editor

When a recording finishes, Annotate opens it in the video editor. So does clicking any clip in the library.

It is the image editor's toolbar over a timeline: arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, pen, highlighter, text, callout, step number and blur, with the same colours, stroke sizes and Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Y. Marks apply to the whole clip and are burned into every frame on export.

• Scrub the timeline to find the moment. The readout shows the exact position.
• Set start and Set end trim the export to the current position, so the fumbling at either end never leaves the machine.
• Blur is recomputed on every frame, so it hides content that moves, not just the frame you drew it on.
• Grab frame pulls the current frame out as a still and opens it in the image editor.
• Export re-encodes the trimmed selection with the annotations burned in. An MP4 can come out as a GIF and a GIF as an MP4; pick the type in the save dialog.

Registration

Clippa is either registered or it isn't. No trial clock, no expiry. Unregistered, everything works: exports carry a small watermark, and recordings and video exports stop at 30 seconds. Registering lifts both. There are two kinds of seat: Desktop (clean exports) and Studio (clean exports plus unlimited recording and video export).

Captures, scrolling captures, step guides and both editors are never limited by length or count, on any seat or none.

Seats attach to your email address, and there are no licence keys. Press Registration, enter the address you bought with, and type the 6 digit code that lands in your inbox. Reinstalls on the same machine never ask for a code again. Moving machines: release the seat in the Registration window, register the new machine with the same email.

Settings worth knowing

• PrintScreen can be claimed as a capture key, the classic takeover.
• Captures land under Pictures\Clippa and recordings under Videos\Clippa unless you point them elsewhere. They're ordinary files, and the library is just those folders.
• Closing the window keeps Clippa in the tray so the hotkeys keep working; Exit lives in the tray menu. Capture, Scrolling capture, Step capture and Record are all on the tray menu too.
• Start with Windows launches it straight into the tray.