Is the honeymoon is over?

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sdcinvan
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Is the honeymoon is over?

Post by sdcinvan »

Hello all,

I am just wondering if I am the only person who is trying to use Capture for image annotations for PDF documentation?

Although, it works relatively well when all your images are at a fixed zoom ratio... the problems become plenty when you try to insert images of many different magnifications (i.e. small pop-up image vs fitting a half screen in the documentation). The way I see it, the biggest problem is that Capture flattens both the annotations (i.e. text bubble) with the background image, rather than treating them independently like other tools. This forces the technical writer to use different DPI for each magnification, which has a direct affect on how the image/annotations appear at different PDF magnifications. My primary requirement is text bubble consistency for all my annotated images... I think this is going to be impossible when using Capture.

I did an experiment to demonstrate what happens:
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 13&t=19404 (see message #17)

Unless, I am doing something wrong, I think I might have to use Adobe InDesign for all my annotated images and then save as a vector image (and hope that Flare treats the vector properly).

Thanks for listening/helping! :)
Shawn in Vancouver, Canada
Main tools used: Flare 11.x, InDesign, Google Docs, Lectora, Captivate.
Report bugs: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx ▪ Feature requests: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx[/i]
doc_guy
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Re: Is the honeymoon is over?

Post by doc_guy »

Shawn,

I'm not sure if this helps, but you can just the "background-scale" on the Image Effects tab to control what the background size is. Once you get the background scale correct, you add your annotations.

Image

If you don't re-size the image in Flare (or in the CSS) then your images should all have the same size captions in them. If you are using Capture Profiles, then you can still re-size all images for pdf output (by changing the resolution on the Flare Print tab). As long as you do this consistently, they will all be the same size.

The key here is to resize the image using the background-scale option.
Paul Pehrson
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sdcinvan
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Re: Is the honeymoon is over?

Post by sdcinvan »

doc_guy wrote:Shawn,

I'm not sure if this helps, but you can just the "background-scale" on the Image Effects tab to control what the background size is. Once you get the background scale correct, you add your annotations.

Image

If you don't re-size the image in Flare (or in the CSS) then your images should all have the same size captions in them. If you are using Capture Profiles, then you can still re-size all images for pdf output (by changing the resolution on the Flare Print tab). As long as you do this consistently, they will all be the same size.

The key here is to resize the image using the background-scale option.
Hello Dave,

Unless I am doing something wrong, I have already approached that method. At first, it seemed to work and I was very pleased, that is, until I discovered that Background-scale was actually changing/reducing the resolution of the images. For instance, a 1:5 image of a half screen capture could not be zoomed in to reveal details. Ouch! That is when it all went down disappointment hill.

I'm still very perplexed that I seem to be alone with this problem. :?

Thanks for listening; it's been a lonely day. :)
Shawn in Vancouver, Canada
Main tools used: Flare 11.x, InDesign, Google Docs, Lectora, Captivate.
Report bugs: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx ▪ Feature requests: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx[/i]
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