Re: Visio-FM-help

[Kevin Cheek <cheek1 -at- sbcglobal -dot- net>]

John,

In my experience, the GIF filter built into Visio is Horrible!
However, Visio 2000 was the last version I tried--it may be better
now. 

I tried two tricks to get around it. The first should have worked,
but I got bogged down and wound up using the second trick instead.

Trick 1: 

1. Set your Acrobat Distiller not to delete the postscript file when
it makes the PDF. 

2. Print the Visio graphic to PDF.

3. Import the .ps file into Frame as an eps file. 

4. Convert to help using a utility that understands how to convert
eps to gif.

Trick 2 (this one worked):

1. Size the visio graphic to exactly the size you want.

2. Use Snagit to capture the image. Region capture works best.

3. Save as .gif.

I specify Snagit because I've found it does the best job of reducing
the colors of a full-color screen capture to 256 colors when creating
a GIF file. I tested HyperSnap, Snagit, and FullShot (FullShot is my
favorite for ease of use and breadth of features). Snagit did a
VASTLY superior job of color reduction. The other two created much
lower quality GIF images--especially when the captured image
contained more than 512 colors. Furthermore, the Snagit-converted
images used a palette that looked equally good in IE, IE-Mac, and
Netscape.

Keep your hair,

Kevin Cheek


--- John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com> wrote:
> 
> Ok, before I pull out any more hair.

Hope my reply was quick enough (are you bald yet?).

> I'm trying to create gifs from images in Visio 2000 that comes into
> FM
> without resizing and looks good, and that when the FM is converted
> to
> HTMLHelp, the images are within acceptable help displays.

> The results is usually poor resolution, and always way oversize
> images that
> I need to resize down to the dimension.