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The simple answer is no, you can't resize a screen capture
without some image degradation, especially in the text. This
is because the lines in most onscreen fonts are only 1 pixel
wide. If you resize to, say, 50%, then to keep the text clear
the lines would need to be 0.5 of a pixel wide. However, you
can't get any smaller than 1 pixel - it's the smallest unit of
a bitmap.
There are some ways to get round this.
1. Do all your screen captures at 640x480 resolution. Then,
provided people are viewing the help in a higher resolution,
they should see everything.
2. Reduce the size of the window, especially if at present
you've got it full screen.
3. Capture only the most important part of the screen.
One important point - make sure you have your display set to
16 colors when you do the capture. I don't know about the
latest winhelp.exe, but the one that comes with Windows 3.1
can only display 16 color bitmaps. If you capture the screen
with your display set to 256 colors, you'll have to reduce the
color depth using PaintShop Pro, which could get messy.
Finally, if you must resize the screenshot, use PSP's Resample
feature (Image > Resample). This blurs the jagged edges and
often looks better. You'll need to increase the color depth of
the bitmap to 16 million colors before doing this, but don't forget
to change it back afterwards.
IMHO avoid using screenshots in help files if you can. Generally
the users will have the application open as well, so provided you
can describe the relevant sections clearly in the text, why go to
all this trouble? It depends on the type of topic you're doing, but
most How To ... type topics don't need a screen shot.
Just my ha'penny worth.
Chris Betterton
User Information Developer
SELECT Software Tools
----------
From: Sharon Key[SMTP:skey -at- I1 -dot- NET]
Sent: 06 June 1997 00:18
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: RoboHelp screen capture
I am hoping someone can offer some suggestions about using screen =
captures in RoboHelp. I've just started developing a Help file using =
screen shots of the new application. I would like to be able to rescale =
the screen shot once its been captured. I've tried this using Paint =
Shop Pro and Visio. Each time I resize the screen smaller, the text =
distorts so that it becomes unreadable. Is there another program I =
could use to resize the screen so that it won't distort the text? I'm =
very new at this and would appreciate any suggestions.
Sharon Key
skey -at- i1 -dot- net
Senior Tech Writer - A.G. Edwards, Inc.
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