[austechwriter] Re: Sec Unclassified: Screen-shots fuzzy in PDF - Problem Identified
- From: Michael Edward Granat <megranat@xxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:15:15 +1000
Aha, Diana (Muzrimas)!
Now I see the primary source of your problem.
Capturing images and pasting them straight into any version of Word higher
than version 6 appears to be the source of your problem.
Recent versions of Word all do strange, proprietary things to create its
idea of a Windows Metafile graphic and, when you resize / reduce an image
to fit in a document, proportional amounts of image information are lost,
sometimes not to be regained. (The results can look horrid, if you copy
and paste direct from any recent Word version to any other application.)
You and your team are far better off to bulk capture and paste on the fly
into the almost universally available Microsoft Wordpad tool (which you can
use as a lossless copy and paste resource) than to Word or, even better,
use a proper screen capture tool that can sequentially number and name new
bitmaps on the fly and save them to a preferred location.
Resizing the graphics in a Wordpad document makes them fit what you want
without image data loss.
Another viable alternative that I use often is to use the Print+Screen
(whole desktop) / Alt+Print Screen (selected window) capture instruction
and paste to the equally ubiquitous Microsoft Paintbrush, saving each new
image from there.
Before doing so, set the default Paintbrush blank image size 6x6 pixels
(Image > Attributes = 6x6 > OK. File > New > Save = No) then whatever you
paste into Paintbrush will stretch to fit, with no wasted blank areas and
no file size bloat.
The above applies to any recent version of the Microsoft Windows operating
environment GUI.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Michael Granat
Write Ideas
At 11:43 10/7/2003 +1000, you wrote:
>Thanks for those who provided feedback.
>
>Only some of the converted screen-shots are fuzzy and my preliminary testing
>after feedback, seems to indicate that the problem is caused by reducing
>images by 95% to 75%. When I reset a test image to 100% I was able to
>produce a clean PDF image.
>
>At this stage, I have little input/control, over the methods used to copy
>and paste screen-shots into Word documents by a large body of technical
>staff creating Installation and Configuration procedures. I will look at
>alternatives, such as cropping instead of re-sizing images.
>
>As, I am already requiring technical staff to key-in the steps for a
>procedure (rather than the instruction "Complete the information shown in
>the image above"!!) the screen-shots are more of a check mechanism, which
>installation/implementation staff insist they want in the documents.
>
>When I've clearly identified the issue, solution/work-around I'll circulate
>advice to my authors.
>
>The following link may also be of help to other...
>
>http://www.codecuts.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=2795
>
>Thanks again
>Diana
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