Poor graphic quality on FM import

[MarkPringle]

I've imported a FrameMaker file into RoboHelp HTML and the graphics quality is terrible on many images; especially images that have text anchored with it (the text display as xxx’s). These images are unreadable, other are OK. I've used RoboHelp for FrameMaker for years and love the quality of the conversion. However, The Tech Comm Suite seems to have taken a step back in the image conversion area. Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.

[Not_user_friendly]

I am having the same trouble. I was wondering what the alternative is? I've triend cutting and pasting. I've tried dragging and dropping. I put a copy of the image into the RoboHelp image files and while it shows up on my C drive I still can't find it when I look for it in RoboHelp.

For some images I just get a small red box.

So I don't know what to do. My project is incomplete without these images.

[jhaystead]

I also am having the same problem with importing graphics. The graphics come through very blurry and distorted, particularly on equations. Has anyone found a solution to this issue yet?

[NBridwell]

My hopefully solution to this was the same I used for Webworks publisher, but the imported File structure is messing me up because it creates a folder for every chapter. I always retain my original graphics in a folder. I import my graphics into FM using a set dpi to get the size I need. This is used for print as they are high quality. For my online graphics, I use a batch file system.
1. Deletes the graphics from my referenced folder.
2. Copies the graphics from my "graphics original" folder to a designated folder.
3. Applies a Photoshop droplet macro/action to all graphics in the folder. Reduces the file size 50% and Sharpens.
4. Copies the modified files to the referenced folder. They look very small, but don't worry.
5. After importing the FM to RoboHelp, replace those graphics with your modified files.
6. For Print - Run a different batch file to simply copy the graphics from your "Graphics Original" back to your referenced folder.

this worked great when using ePublisher, but not so seamless with TCS. I've read to use Conditional Text for this, which is not a very good solution when you already use a lot of conditional text for different functionality in your program.

Some graphics do not require modification for online help, so put those in a separate folder "Untouched" graphics". Like PDFs and small icons.

Hope this helps. I'm still trying to figure out a method for TCS.

[vivek_k-GfmzA1]

This problem has been fixed in the latest RH7 patch.
Please install RH 702 patch from
http://www.adobe.com/support/robohelp/downloads.html

Install FM 804 patch.

Restart you machine and try add/update of FM files in RoboHelp. You should get a better quality converted images.

Vivek.
Adobe Systems.

[Cheryl_B_in_Las_Vegas]

I installed the RH patch and rebooted. I don't see a FM 8.04 patch. The latest FM I see on Adobe's web is 8.0p273, which is what I have. I rebooted.

However, everything (graphics and callouts) in anchored frames is still fuzzy.

[Newsgroup_User]

CherylB,

The FM8.0.4 patch is a fix for those that installed the FM8.0.3 patch
before it was recalled last week. There's a new patch in the works for
those of us still at 8.0.2 that will incorporate both. Check in the
FrameMaker forum for announcements on this or change your preferences
to let your Update Manager check on a more frequent basis.

[JainVivek]

FrameMaker patch 8.0.4 is live now.

[wndsfr]

I have updated to RH 7.02.001 and FM 8.0p277 but it has made no difference. In a test FM8 file, an imported source PNG image of 49KB @ 972x724px is arbitrarily converted to 28kb @ 527x341px in the RH7 Webhelp rendering process.

My expectation is that a "fix" will simply pass through the source art file unchanged.

Whatever RH is doing, it is a killer for screenshots of GUIs and Web pages, because the text rendering is particularly bad when RoboHelp resizes the images.

The only thing that seems to work reliably is manually reinserting the source art into the RH files.

They do know the definition of "single source" down in Adobe land, right?

[jhaystead]

i am also on the latest FM version, 8.0.4, and the latest RoboHelp version, and am still suffering from poor graphic imports. as a few people have mentioned, there are workarounds where you can manually save all the graphics elsewhere and import them separately into RoboHelp after the FM files have been imported, but that seems to be an ungodly amount of work to perform when you have as many equations/graphics in your documents as i do. shouldn't RoboHelp be able to import FM files with no loss of graphic quality?

[JainVivek]

Hi wndsfr

What is the DPI setting you used for importing the image in FrameMaker? Is the image embedded or referenced?

[wndsfr]

Hi,

First let me say that I encountered this problem back in Feb 2008 and mentioned it here.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=680&threadid=1339003

At that time, I thought it was an artifact of using tiff files and CHM compression - too many other things were wrong with that acquired project for me to be certain that RoboHelp had a problem. Using PNG seemed to cure the problem.

Several months later and a couple of new projects and I'm fairly certain that Robohelp is munging the graphics when it imports FM8 books.

The images in my books (almost a hundred screenshots in one 300-page volume and about 100 in another 200-page volume) are all imported by reference.

The application is a Web-based Java app with way too much text in small fonts. I generate each screenshot at a high 300ppi resolution and carefully crop/size them for the 7x9 page format using Photoshop. I'm under no illusions here - downsizing bitmap Web screenshots to fit on a printed page is going to cause loss of resolution. However, I get crisp hi-res images in the Frame-to-PDF output and the source images are sized so that they should work well for both print and Webhelp output.

Now, when I first encounterd this problem in February, converting all the images to PNG seemed to work well for CHM output. It appears that PNG is not well supported in Webhelp, so the images are all converted to JPEG at max qualiity, which also adds many MB to the size of a PDF. This is documented in the RH help at:

Home > Images and multimedia > Use images in topics

Note: If you are generating WebHelp Pro or WebHelp output, use .GIF or .JPG image files.


So I believe that I am following all the RH import requirements. However, when I run the FM-to-RH import, it's clear that the images in the help folders have been resized by the import process.

[wndsfr]

More detail on the artwork:

Typical images are screen captures of a Web-based application captured and resized in Photoshop. A screenshot image might have the following characteristics when examined in Photoshop:

770x515 pixels
5.2" x 3.4" approx document size
150ppi resolution.

The image is imported to FM at the native resolution and fits within the measure. Becuase we are already resizing from typical Web application on-screen sizes to a 7x9 page size, some bitmap compression artifacts are unavoidable. However, the screenshots are perfectly acceptable in the PDF print output.

One thing that we do notice is that there is a visible difference in resolution when printing PDF and viewing it in Acrobat viewer. However, if you view the PDF document at 125% magnification, the screenshots are sharp.

The output from Robohelp is Webhelp, so even though we capture screenshots in less lossy formats such as PNG, we convert them to JPG at max quality (min compression). This is because the Robohelp documentation tells us to avoid using PNG for Webhelp.

After importing the FM8 files into RH7, we find that the same image under the !SSL! folder now has the following attributes:

498 x 332 pixels
3.3 x 2.2 approx document size
@150ppi

So the resolution (150ppi) is unchanged but the image appears as if has been resampled. In the Webhelp output, the images not only look small but any text in the screenshot is illegible.

If we insert in Robohelp the original images from the Framemager foldes to replace the images that are resized by the import process, then the Webhelp is fine. However, it is a lot of work to manually replace 200 screenshots. We also have to repeat that process every time we update the content.


I hope this explains the problem. It would appear to be very easy for you to verify the problem, because it is not simply a subjective matter of bitmap image quality. Robohelp is clearly resizing the imported images for some reason.

[JainVivek]

Hi MarkPringle

Please reset the settings in FrameMaker File -> Preferences -> General - "Greek Screen Text smaller than :" and make it smaller than 7pt - say 3pt. This should solve the issue of Greek text "xxx" in your images.

[wndsfr]

Any word on this - does Adobe even acknowledge that is is a problem?

[jhaystead]

based on the previous posts, it seems as if they believe they've fixed it with the latest updates, but i'm still having the same problems with the latest versions of RH and FM. for me, all my images come through fine, but every equation is extremely fuzzy. my company has decided not to use RH for help, because it's unreadable with all the fuzzy equations.

[JC1260]

I'm getting the same behavior (w/ FM 8 p227, and RH 7.03.001). Have you found any solutions or workarounds?

I noticed that if you export the content directly from FM to HTML the equations look somewhat better (as FM does the exporting in gif format) but how does one instruct RH to import FM content and keep the equations in GIF format? Any clues?

[Guest]

Hi all,

I only recently got back to experimenting with FM (8.0p277) to RH. (Fortunately, we found a solution for the client where they could use the PDF instead of HTML, so my issues with RH not importing my screenshots became less urgent.) Most recently, I found that if I converted all my FM screenshots (.tif files) to .png and imported the FM book to RH by reference, where I had blank spaces previously, my screenshots appeared. I do have 2 graphic insets that contain a sample snippet of code that does appear pixellated in RH, however. Still some work to do, but am making progress...

[Guest]

I'm having a slightly different flavor of image problem in RoboHelp:

When I bring my FM content into RH, or simply update it, all the images come in with a lot of extra space around them. I am forced to use the RH image editor to crop the images (it's the images that get the extra margins mostly on the left and the right). Of course, this means that unless I check Preserve Modifications for every topic with a screenshot, I lose all my edits upon update.

Has anybody seen this problem, and is there something I can do on the FM side to prevent this from happening? My images in FM by the way look fine; the anchored frames that hold my images fit snugly around each image.

[Guest]

This is my own answer to my own previous question about extra white space around images brought into RH with FM content. I think I figured out what RH is doing with images brought in with FM content.

If you have an image that is flush left with the left margin of the main body of the text (body text is indented so that headings "stick out"), RH assumes you want it to remain in that position, regardless of the position of the text in the converted RH topics and sticks in extra space around the image to fix its position.

I don't like this at all.

[wndsfr]

> my company has decided not to use RH for help....

Same here.

[Tom.H]

Hi,

I have the latest patches, but this problem prevails.

My workaround is to add text and callouts to the screen captures, when necessary, using Snag-it so they become part of the bitmap and won't cause the severe degradation I would otherwise see by using callouts and text from FrameMaker before the RoboHelp import.

Even doing this, the quality at normal size for the Frame page is unacceptable when imported to RoboHelp, so I:

1. create a second copy of the anchored frame with the screenshot with callouts, etc. in Frame
2. put it on a separate paragraph line and anchor
3. increase the frame and image size by about 50 percent
4. condition the whole new version out for the printed docs
5. condition the original (smaller) version out for the online help (make sure the conditional tags are imported into the help system)

This is a painful workaround that decreases the quality of the printed and the online help outputs, but it is the only compromise I've found that gets me close to where I want to be. As with the other numerous remaining shortcomings of the TC suite, coming up with this half-baked solution has been a big time drain.

Regards,

Tom

[Cheryl_B_in_Las_Vegas]

Tom,
I just reviewed your answer while looking at the new postings. I noticed that you use the smaller graphics in RH.

One of my big beefs with online help is that you can't zoom in to see details on the graphics, like you can in pdf files.

Does your solution make the graphics too small onscreen?

Cheryl

[wndsfr]

Hi All,

I downloaded the trial version of MadCap flare and it imports my FM 8 books and exports all the images perfectly. (Set no resize on import)

You can trade in your RoboHelp licenses and get $400 off Flare.

[Tom.H]

Wndsfr,

That's interesting. Do your screens have vector content created in FrameMaker, too? (callouts and/or arrows, etc.)

It's not within my influence or discretion to change software packages, but interesting to know for future purposes.

Tom