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Subject:Re: including only part of dialog in screen shot From:Lane Pasut <Larissa -dot- Pasut -at- OMEGARESEARCH -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 6 May 1999 10:22:12 -0400
In the absence of the nice fading effect, we crop the dialog box a bit
larger than the specific area (to give a frame of reference so the user
knows where the specific area is with respect to the whole) and then draw an
oval around the specific area of interest. This seems to work well and looks
pretty decent.
Lane Pasut
User Education
Omega Research, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gilda Spitz [mailto:Gilda_Spitz -at- MARKHAM -dot- LONGVIEW -dot- CA]
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 1999 10:12 AM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: including only part of dialog in screen shot
How do other people "out there" handle this situation?
When we have a dialog or other graphic element that is quite
large, and the
accompanying text refers to one small part of it, we
sometimes don't want
to show the whole thing, for two reasons:
- the whole dialog takes up too much space
- we want the reader to focus on the particular area we're
explaining
But how do you make it clear that you're including a partial
picture?
At a previous employer, I used to work for a manager who was
very talented
with graphic software. He used Photoshop to create a very
nice fading
effect above or below the focus area, which neatly
illustrated that the
screen shot was "incomplete". I have no such talents, and
I'm looking for
some simpler way to accomplish the same effect with just MS
Paint.
I've experimented the spray can tool, but it looks weird.
For now, we're
just including a sentence that says " Only the pertinent
area of ...
appears in this example", but I'm really not happy with it.
Sometimes we
just use the whole picture along with a callout.
What do you folks out there do?
Gilda Spitz
Manager, Documentation and Translation
Longview Solutions, Inc.
