screen captures: how to get the best quality

[Andrew]

1) I don't know how Word does it, but it really is excellent at retaining detail when you resize. Unfortunately, there's no way to keep that quality when you copy the resized image out of Word.

Word uses some "tricks" to make its screen images look better, but I'm pretty sure it's only true for the screen. If you print, they don't look any better than other compressed images.

I disagree. I've printed many manuals from Word documents, and the quality is excellent.

I didn't say it was bad; merely that it wasn't better than other decent downsampled graphics. For example, I cannot tell the difference between my Flare screen shots printed from PDF, or old ones captured and resized in Word.

[Andrew]

Hmmmm, OK, I admit that my knowledge of vector based images is limited to me knowing that they exist and what they are there for. I did read that the screen shot in the clipboard comes as bitmap and as vector, but of course I cannot find that article anymore. Who knows, maybe there is just something to the way the image gets processed that makes it look less mushy and fuzzy.

I'm not sure how that's possible without a lot of processing; screens are bitmaps, "drawn" using tiny dots in direct proportions. Vector graphics are curves and shapes represented by mathematic equations.

Still, there seems to be no way to get decent screenshots into a PDF.

My screenshots are fine in PDF, as long as they are printed or zoomed in to at least 120%. 100% they are readable, but ugly.

[MikeKatz]

I didn't say it was bad; merely that it wasn't better than other decent downsampled graphics. For example, I cannot tell the difference between my Flare screen shots printed from PDF, or old ones captured and resized in Word.

Hi Andrew
I've never printed from Flare, so I can't comment on that.
However, I've tried to downsize graphics with many programs, and then printed those, and nothing compares to the quality of the Word versions.
I've also converted the Word documents to PDF, and then, as others have noted, the screen quality is acceptable only at around 120% view and higher. Are you saying that creating a PDF via Flare, and then viewing the PDF on screen, gives acceptable quality at lower magnifications? That could be interesting!

[Andrew]

I've also converted the Word documents to PDF, and then, as others have noted, the screen quality is acceptable only at around 120% view and higher. Are you saying that creating a PDF via Flare, and then viewing the PDF on screen, gives acceptable quality at lower magnifications? That could be interesting!

No, I'm saying exactly what you are saying: on-screen, PDF images look worse than Word images do. Word looks better than most downsized images on-screen than other programs I've seen -- as I said, Word employs some tricks to get that done (or at least, that's what I ran across when I was looking into this back in 2000-2001ish). As I understand it, those "tricks" do not translate into print (or should I say, Word document pictures do not seem to print better than PDF); the PDFs that look poor on screen (where the same picture looks good in Word) both print about the same (both print well). My point is that the PDF Reader's rendering is problematic (where Word's is quite good).

I may be wrong about all of this; Word may have improved, or others may be using compressions / downsamplings to which I've not had to resort. I'm speaking from my experiences, and the reading I'd done about it 10 years ago (I wanted to know why pictures that looked good in Word looked awful in PDF, even in the best Press quality PDF settings).

[ChristineL]

I did a lot of testing and my results confirm what others already suggested:
* png for screenshots. Do not downsample screenshots. Scale them down only if you must-the quality, readability, and sharpness decreases dramatically.
* JPG for illustrations (300 dpi, Quality = 10). I tried WMF and EMF, but the file size gets huge and I see a lot of artifacts, for examples, object borders that should not be there. The only disadvantage is that the chm file size increases dramatically, because the "max-width" parameter in the CSS only scales the image down when it is displayed, the full image is included in the compiled help. (I would like the feature that images would be resampled for online outputs.)

(I don't get the point of why one should use a vector format (wmf) for screenshots, as one suggested, but I never tried it.)

Scaling (if required): Only via the Print Resolution parameter (defined in the Capture profile) and the "max-width" parameter in the CSS. Using the Scale function in Capture or Flare also affects the print output, i. e. the resolution will be lower and thus the quality decreases. I would like the possibility to define different img resolutions for the media types in the CSS, but unfortunately, that is not possible.

By doing so, our image quality is very high, even for offset or digital printing of manuals.

Best regards, Christine

[livetoski]

thanks very much Christine, that confirms my findings as well. Much appreciated. Linda

[LTinker68]

(I don't get the point of why one should use a vector format (wmf) for screenshots, as one suggested, but I never tried it.)

I think it was later suggested doing so would be useless, as a screenshot by definition is a bitmap, so I usually save screenshots as PNGs. I usually save native vector files as high resolution PNG files for print output.

[RamonS]

Well, now I finally got around to dive a bit more into this. Fact is, the Windows clipboard can store multiple formats of the same content in the clipboard. See here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 85%29.aspx
Also, based on this article the content stored in the clipboard is a metafile that gets read out in the desired format using GDI. See here: http://www.visual-integrity.com/format-meta-in.htm

That said, the statement that a bitmap is stored in the clipboard doesn't seem to be entirely correct, but before I cry foul I need to collect some more (credible) information.

[LTinker68]

... the statement that a bitmap is stored in the clipboard doesn't seem to be entirely correct...

I, for one, wasn't talking about where it's stored. I was talking about the fact that a bitmap can't be sized as neatly as a vector format because a bitmap is a collection of pixels at a set size and a vector format is a collection of mathematical data that depicts how the image is built. A vector image can be scaled by changing the mathematical values so it can be redrawn as clearly as the original. If you try to enlarge a bitmap, you get that pixelated, mosaic-looking effect. If you shrink a bitmap it'll be blurry, even with the best sampling, and the more colors and complex lines in the image the worse the effect. That is the one thing I can say is better in Word than any other document-writing software I've seen -- if you shrink a bitmap in Word it turns out pretty good. You still can't enlarge the image too much, but it's definitely better when sizing bitmaps down.

All of the above is the way as I understand it bitmaps and vectors behave.

[schultza]

We are in process of trying to figure out the best profile settings to apply to images from our pre-Flare documents that we are migrating. Most of these images came from Snag-it. What I'm quickly coming to discover, especially from this forum post, is that there aren't any "right answers" for what to set Capture profile settings to. Just experiment until our images look "as good as they're going to get."

From here on out, though, everything I'm reading seems to point to taking screen shots at approximately the same size (800 px by 450 px), saving as a PNG, and NOT modifying them. Then apply a Capture profile to these new images with online DPI of 72 or 96, and print DPI of around 150, and keep the Background Scale set to 1.0.

Anyone come to any other conclusions?