TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Bill Swallow wrote this in response to Rédactrice Technique:
>
> Do they look bad in FrameMaker or in your final output? FrameMaker
> will just show thumbnails, or low resolution images while you're
> working. Resizing your images using PhotoShop will only garantee you
> one thing - that your images will never be as crisp or clean as they
> were when you shot them. All physical resizing of screenshots causes
> image distortion.
It might be worthwhile to make a distinction here between resizing
and rescaling.
The resizing that Bill refers to as inevitably degrading the image
is any approach that changes the pixel dimensions of the image.
Any process that changes the number of pixels has to resample
the image, averaging adjacent pixels together, either to eliminate
some number of pixels (to make the image smaller) or insert
interpolated pixels that didn't exist begfore (to make the image
larger). It's obvious that such an approach will have nasty
consequences when adjacent pixels are of significantly different
color values, as will be the case with text objects or the edges
of GUI elements in a screenshot.
When I refer to rescaling, I'm talking about changing the dpi
value in FrameMaker, which neither throws away nor creates
image pixels and is therefore a lossless process. The onscreen
display may suffer, but the printed output--whether to hard
copy or to PDF (as long as you have the right job options
settings for Distiller)--should be fine.
Create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to Help file formats or
printed documentation. Features include support for Windows Vista & 2007
Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more. http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList
True single source, conditional content, PDF export, modular help.
Help & Manual is the most powerful authoring tool for technical
documentation. Boost your productivity! http://www.helpandmanual.com
---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-
