Why do screenshot borders get cropped when they're imported?

Report · Aug 11, 2012

Hi, FrameMaker 10 Windows 7, images created in SnagIt 10 and then SnagIt 8.

Hi,

First of all thank you for your great help, especially Van Kurtz! Now I have another problem.

When I take a screenshot, I put a border around it in SnagIt. I import the images in anchored frames, which I've managed to tame. However, the image imports without borders. I use 300dpi and tried reducing to 275, but I can't reduce any more as the company requests that we use 300 and also, the images would be blurry.

After I import, I hold the Shift key drag the border of the image to get it the size I want in the anchored frame (BTW is there any way to do this automatically, as in InDesign?) and there is still no border (and there wasn't one when the image was originally imported).

Why is the border cropped? This usually happens at only one or two sides, not completely, usually the bottom or right sides, and randomly. The image is always well inside the anchored frame.

Thank you so much in advance!

Susan

PS I thought this might be solved when I saved the doc as PDF, but no. And the printed doc is identical to the PDF on the screen.

PSS Is this the fault of the older version of SnagIt (8)? I used SnagIt 10 til my trial ran out and then was forced to switch to 8. It may just be that I didn't notice this problem until recently, but some of my images in the document ARE okay with borders complete.

Report · Aug 13, 2012

I do not know about applying borders in Snagit, but the PDF output is the check. Do not rely on what you see in the FrameMaker file. Be sure to save the file from Snagit in a standard bitmap format, such as tiff, jpeg, bmp, or eps.

When you import a bitmap file, such as tiff, jpg, or bmp, a dialog should display allowing you to set the size you want the graphic to display in the FrameMaker file. The choices are expressed in dpi with inches (or points or picas) in parentheses. NOTE this does NOT change the logical resolution (dpi) of the image, just the physical display size. The process does NOT resample or downsample the image. SO, you can keep the screenshots at 300 dpi; lowering the resolution has nothing to do with the border issue.

Regarding the border, you can open the file in another bitmap editor, preferrably Photoshop, and make sure that it is actually there. If it is, then FrameMaker should not remove it. If it is NOT there, then FrameMaker is not the problem.

Also, what is the thickness of the border? If it is only 1 pixel and you scale the image down, then it may not be very visible in the PDF. In Acrobat, magnify the PDF to make sure the border really is or is not there.

Van

Report · Aug 13, 2012

> The choices are expressed in dpi with inches (or points or picas) in parentheses.

For a bitmap imported as EPS (and, I suspect, PDF), the choice is a percentage, default 100%. FM won't give you any clue about what the originating dpi is, so you have to know, if you care. And the preview image is of no visual help, because it will be a coarse 72 dpi indexed color at 100%.

> NOTE this does NOT change the logical resolution (dpi) of the image, just the physical display size.

Strictly speaking, it does change the dpi. What doesn't change is the overall pixel dimensions. If you import a 1x1inch 100x100 dpi screenshot TIFF at 2x2 inches, it will be 50 dpi (but still 100x100 pixels).

Borders can be applied by Framemaker itself, and they will be vector, and not subject to scaling, aliasing or vanishing at small scales. Applying borders prior to rasterization or in a raster editor often has unhappy results.

Next hurdle: rendering to PDF. Save-as, Print-to or Distill are all subject to the Job Options, which can easily have defaulted to "subsample to really blurry with nasty compression artifacts". Make sure the settings preserve the res you desire for the data structure involved (bitmap, contone gray or contone color). e.g. "downsample to 300 dpi for images above 450 dpi", and LZW or ZIP compression for screenshots, as a rule.

Report · Aug 13, 2012

Strictly speaking, it does change the dpi.

Well, speaking more strictly, it does NOT change the dpi, that is, the logical resolution stored in the image file (except gif images, which to my knowledge do not store a resolution). Of course, the displayed resolution does change. The point is that FrameMaker does not manipulate the image file in any way; it simply scales it to the size specified by the user.

Screen shots, being screen shots, have a pixel dimension that depends upon the screen size from which they are captured. In my opinion, screen shots should not be resampled. Thus, it is immaterial to what resolution they are set either by the capturing program or an image editing program. So, one can either set them to 300 dpi or not, as long as there is no resampling in the process. Then do any necessary scaling in FrameMaker. Ultimately Acrobat determines how it looks when the PDF is created, according to the settings in the joboptions.

Report · Aug 13, 2012

>> Strictly speaking, it does change the dpi. (downstream)

> Well, speaking more strictly, it does NOT change the dpi (at the source)

Both are true.

> The point is that FrameMaker does not manipulate the image file in any way; ...

... at the source; downstream can be a different matter.

> In my opinion, screen shots should not be resampled.

Agreed. And generally, they are low enough res that they will be below typical Job Option (JO) resampling thresholds.

However, if you can't avoid having a curve-matching compression (e.g. JPEG) applied, you can sometimes minimize artifacts in rendered screenshots by first upsampling them "nearest neighbor" (NN) to some res well above the JO threshold. NN is lossless for upscaling, and gives the downsampling algorithms more strongly defined edges to attempt to maintain.