Ctrl S or Ctrl P?

William asked a question on the RASC Toronto Centre Yahoo!Group. He was trying to figure out how to print in Stellarium. Somewhere along the way, he had learned about the keyboard Ctrl S. But he reported that "it did not work."

Almost immediately Jeff piped up saying that, normally, in a Windows application, it was Ctrl P that one would use to print.

I had to step in before things got out of hand...

I referred to the Stellarium user guide (available as a link for the main site), in particular pages 24 and 38 regarding saving screen snapshots, keyboard shortcuts, etc. I directed people, once again, to my Stellarium handout, in PDF format, the handout that I provided during my astronomy software demo. It notes the current features, and lack thereof, in the program. And finally I encouraged people to examine my list of the keyboard shortcuts for version 0.10.x.

When William contacted me privately for a clarification, I laid it all out:

Stellarium 0.10.x does not print. It has no printing features. Sadly. So, Ctrl P truly does nothing.

Ctrl S makes a snapshot of the screen. On Windows and Macintosh computers, it normally puts an image file on the desktop. This file, if one knows how, could be brought into another program, another document, for printing.

I explained that I take screen shots from planetarium software all the time, put them into MS Word, inverted the colours to black on white, and successfully printed them.

And finally, I reminded William that Stellarium 0.10.x is a beta release. So we must expect there to be problems...

He sent me a thank you.