Image quality when re-sizing graphics in RH 11 project

[dlengland]

Good morning all,

I've added PNG images to my project using the Insert Image function but they're too large (1081 x 1922) and need to be re-sized. When I edit the size in the Image Properties box, the image loses so much quality they almost can't be used.  The original images were taken from a Word document where I believe the images were simply screen captures that were pasted into Word without being saved as an image file first.  The resulting images in Word were then saved as pictures and then added to the RH project.  (Hope I've explained this clearly.)

Any help with what's wrong with this process and how I might use these images from the Word doc would be greatly appreciated.  Re-creating the images that were the original screen shots in Word would be a monumental task so I'm hoping that's not the problem.

Thanks as always.

Diane

[KimberlyO]

Hi Diane,

Have you checked the image quality in your output format? The reason I am asking this is because in RoboHelp 10 editor, for me, the image quality looks fuzzy and basically unreadable but when I create my Word user guide and .chm files, the images look "normal".  (However, if the images were crap to start with, like the images in my inherited FrameMaker projects, they stay crap. No amount of Harry Potter wizardry will help.)

Kimberly

[Captiv8r]

Hi all

When using images, you never Ever EVER want to just insert them and use the dialog to "size" them to fit the area you want. You should always open the image in an image editing tool such as Gimp, Photoshop or SnagIt and rescale the image to the desired size and use it in RoboHelp projects that way. If you really need the image to be much larger, make a copy of it, then link from the smaller scaled down image to the larger one.

Cheers... Rick

[dlengland]

Thanks for that lesson, Rick.  So is it a stupid question to ask what the re-size functionality is for...when you WOULD use it?

[Captiv8r]

Hmmm, a good and fair question I suppose. Let's say that you wanted to create a situation where you provide a very small "thumbnail" where your end user sees the thumbnail and clicks to see the full sized image. I suppose in that case you would leave the image at the larger size, then scale it down using the sizing functions in the RoboHelp dialog. You know it will result in a bit of a "less than satisfactory" visual, but it's only there as a placeholder.

Normally when you have that type of a situation, you want as "clean" of an image as you can get for the thumbnail. So if you REALLY wanted to go the extra mile, you could create a smaller thumbnail image using an image editing application, then you would insert that image into your RoboHelp topic. And at that point you have increased your workload a bit by first, having to make edits to the original image, then having additional images to maintain. (The thumbnail and the full sized image)

So from that aspect, only having a single image would certainly alleviate some of the workload. That's about the only time I can fathom the ability to specify the image size actually being worthwhile.

Hopefully that made some sense.

Cheers... Rick

[dlengland]

Makes sense. Thanks for the thorough explanation. Haven't used thumbnails in quite a while so had forgotten about that scenario.

Sent from my iPad

[dlengland]

Hi Kimberly,

Thanks for the response.  I should have mentioned that I had already checked that knowing that as you said sometimes they look different in RH editor than in the output.  Unfortunately in this case they look terrible in all output formats as well.  I suspect they'll need all new source image files but am hoping against hope there might be a solution short of that.

Diane