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Re: Tips for Screen Captures for MadCap Flare/Capture
Subject:Re: Tips for Screen Captures for MadCap Flare/Capture From:Gregory P Sweet <gps03 -at- health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:38:44 -0400
Hi Claudine,
The first thing you need to understand about images is that your screen
resolution doesn't really matter. Image resolution is much mor e
important.. Standard screen resolution these days is 38 pixels/cm. So any
piece of your screen that is 38 pixels wide will take up about one cm in
your printed document. So the largest width you could work with without
scaling would be about 600 pixels.
For smaller stuff this is probably fine as you most likely won't need to
scale anything anyway so a single image will work find for print and
screen. For larger images, that will need to be scaled to fit into your
layout, you'll need a print and screen image. Screen images are made by
sampling, or throwing away pixels, remember that the screen can only
display 38 ppcm so the only way to scale an image smaller is to throw away
some of the pixels. Of course you get resultant loss of clarity you'd
expect from throwing away pixels. In print you do not need to loose any
clarity because you can simply pack the pixels more closely together.
For example:
an 800 x 600 pixel screen cap @ 38ppcm will be 21 x 16 cm in print.
If we double the image resolution to 76ppcm the printed image size drops to
10.5 x 8 cm yet the images still occupies 800 x 600 pixels on the computer
screen.
If we want that 800 x 600 image to only occupy 400 x 300 pixels on the
screen, then we have no choice but to resample and throw away half of the
pixels in the image.
Now the bad news is that most authoring programs, Word, Open Office,
Robohelp, etc. do not adjust image resolution when your resize an image,
rather they take the throw pixels away method, which typically results in
muddy images in your printed documents. I cannot speak for Madcap's producs
as I haven't used them, but you typically need to work with a dedicated
image editor like Photoshop to adjust image resolution without resampling.
Cheers!
-Greg
techwr-l-bounces+gps03=health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com wrote on
03/30/2011 02:10:31 AM:
> From: "Claudine Chausson" <claudine -dot- chausson -at- sword-fircosoft -dot- com>
> To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Date: 03/30/2011 02:10 AM
> Subject: Tips for Screen Captures for MadCap Flare/Capture
> Sent by: techwr-l-bounces+gps03=health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm working on a major project and this is my first in Flare. I'll
receive a
> training next month but for now, I have to manage on my own.
>
> I'm about to go on with screen captures to illustrate the manual and I
need
> advice on the settings I have to set in Flare or Capture to have a clean
> rendering in the final PDF. I also would like to have the possibility to
use
> the same images for WebHelp. Are there any settings I have to set
beforehand
> so I can single-source screen captures as well?
>
> In case it matters, I'm going to have small captures (buttons, icons, .)
> usually inline with the text and larger ones (dialogs, parts of
screen, .)
> which can spread over the full width of the page (exclusion of margins,
> approximately 16cm).
>
> In case it matters as well (I know very little about images), I have two
> screens: one resolution is 1440 x 900 and the other 1920 x 1080. The
> software I'm documenting is usually displayed on the 1920 x 1080 screen.
>
> Thank you very much for your help.
> Cheers,
>
> Claudine
> Claudine Chausson
> Technical writer
> Sword FircoSoft
> <http://www.sword-fircosoft.com> www.sword-fircosoft.com
> dir +33 1 44 67 24 83
> fax +33 1 44 67 24 48
> e <mailto:christine -dot- berthome -at- sword-fircosoft -dot- com>
> claudine -dot- chausson -at- sword-fircosoft -dot- com
> <http://www.sword-group.com> www.sword-group.com
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