Pasting Image Data from the Clipboard

[MkMr]

One feature of Robohelp I used to use a lot was the ability to copy an image (say a .jpg file) onto the clipboard and then just paste it into a document. Robohelp would create a file for the image, place it into the projects images folder and insert a reference to that image into the doc. This was really convenient.

Can Flare do this same thing?

Thanks in advance,
Mark

[alaltenburg]

Mark,

What you would need to do is save the picture as a file and then within Madcap, just go to Insert>Picture.

Andrea

[Andrew]

If it's a screen cap, and if you have Capture, the Flare > Capture integration is pretty good. Go to Insert > Screen Capture and Flare will automatically insert the screen cap into your project.

[i-tietz]

One feature of Robohelp I used to use a lot was the ability to copy an image (say a .jpg file) onto the clipboard and then just paste it into a document. Robohelp would create a file for the image, place it into the projects images folder and insert a reference to that image into the doc. This was really convenient.
Can Flare do this same thing?

NO.
Maybe you would want to post an enhancement/bug?
I already did, too. It's a nuisance to always open graphical software and save the file ... I agree!

[MkMr]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I am using the "Insert Picture" method now (and not using Capture). I was just hoping there was a method similar to RoboHelp. As i-tietz suggest this is definitely a candidate for a feature request - which i just submitted.

Mark

[RamonS]

It's a nuisance to always open graphical software and save the file ... I agree!

So, you just take a screen shot and want to insert the bitmap into the help? While that is surely easier it probably also doesn't generate the results you want in most cases. Besides that, you can only insert either the entire desktop or the active form, which the users look at anyway when using CSH.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't see the real benefit.

[i-tietz]

So, you just take a screen shot and want to insert the bitmap into the help? While that is surely easier it probably also doesn't generate the results you want in most cases. Besides that, you can only insert either the entire desktop or the active form, which the users look at anyway when using CSH.

1. You don't only get forms or desktops, if you have the approriate software to also make snaps of menus or buttons or windows that i chose ...
2. In our manual (i.e.: NOT CSH) we do have pics of whole forms.
3. Even if you use CSH the help doesn't only contain CSH topics
4. Usually I have three pic files for each pic:
- One "basic" in the proprietary format of the graphical software - in case it needs to be changed afterwards and I don't want to go through the whole hassle again.
- One in the correct format, but outside the content folder of the project.
Because Flare doesn't respond well to me changing pics that are in use in the project - usually Flare crashes ...
- A copy in the content folder of the project.

That's a lot of work for each screenshot. Would be a lot easier, if Flare would do the saving job for me. Even changes, if necessary, wouldn't be such an effort.

[LTinker68]

Just be aware that if you're going to use the same project to output to print that you're probably going to want a higher resolution of screenshot then you get from a basic screen capture using the keyboard and Windows' built-in functionality. With Capture you can essentially have two versions of a screenshot -- one for online output and one for print output -- but with varying DPI for the outputs. If you strictly use the Windows' built-in functionality, then you're stuck at the lower (online version) DPI for both.

[i-tietz]

I'm lucky enough to produce help for software ... nobody expects us to produce high-quality written documentation ...

[KevinDAmery]

I'm lucky enough to produce help for software ... nobody expects us to produce high-quality written documentation ...

Uhhhmmm, that depends on the software and your market. A few years back my employer at the time decided to stop providing a bound manual with their product, and you should have heard the complaints we got.

[JJMC]

Guys,

This is one of my biggest issues with Flare overall.

Please see it from this point of view:
We get manuals (literally 5 or 6 of them that we then build a help system from so that F1 help, etc. work from the software).
The manuals have literally maybe 300+ pictures that are all done - i.e. any formatting..adding circles for highlights, etc. is done by the group making the manuals.
Now, I am supposed to take each picture and instead of just copy/paste from Word, copy from Word, paste into Paint, Save Copy As a Bitmap file, convert to GIF to reduce the size, put the file in the appropriate directory and then Import | Picture? It's way more work then it would have to be. And as far as image quality, etc. goes, RoboHelp seemed to work fine.

Also, for Screenshots, often all we do is Alt+Print Screen and that is all that we need - we don't need to change the picture at all and have no interest in it being saved as a seperate file. This worked find for use with RoboHelp for a long time.

Sometimes it takes me 5 or 10 minutes to make a topic that with RoboHelp used to take literally 10 seconds. I was told I had to change to Flare because of a real minor item that I don't even know if it's correct or not (our Japanese users said with the RoboHelp help the Index wasn't sorted or something), but otherwise I would have stayed on RoboHelp as their interface is so much more understanding of directly pasting items from Word, etc.

JJ

[KevinDAmery]

I would send Madcap a feature request. You can do so here:

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

They tell us that the more people ask for something the more likely it is to get implemented, so if you want it, ask them for it, even if you're sure someone else has asked already.

[LTinker68]

The manuals have literally maybe 300+ pictures that are all done - i.e. any formatting..adding circles for highlights, etc. is done by the group making the manuals.
Now, I am supposed to take each picture and instead of just copy/paste from Word, copy from Word, paste into Paint, Save Copy As a Bitmap file, convert to GIF to reduce the size, put the file in the appropriate directory and then Import | Picture?

You might want to take a look at MadCap's Capture software. For some reason I thought I read somewhere that it could capture from the clipboard, but I might be remembering that wrong. However, in Capture, you can add annotations and other effects and save that data with the screenshot file, so if your screenshot changes slightly but its dimensions are the same, then I believe you can change the picture under the annotations without having to redo the annotations. And if you ever do have to create a print version, too, then you can have both DPI versions in the same graphic file and Flare picks the correct version to use based on the output.

Unfortunately, I haven't had time to play with Capture much since its initial v1 release because there just haven't been many projects where I've had to output to online and print or where I've had to annotate pictures. So I'm not an expert, by any means, on its capabilities. I do know that it still has a problem with the GIF output, so you'd have to save them as PNGs, which aren't as small as GIFs, but are supported in browsers (although IE6 doesn't display the transparencies correctly).

Anyway, it's something that might help your workflow once you learn it, if it can indeed capture from the clipboard.

[i-tietz]

I was told I had to change to Flare because of a real minor item that I don't even know if it's correct or not (our Japanese users said with the RoboHelp help the Index wasn't sorted or something),

I think I know what that was - in German we have a words bound together with hyphens. The index in the HTML Help didn't assign those topics to the keywords with hyphen but to the keyword that is the first part of the keyword.
E.g.: Keyword "Artikel" and keyword "Artikel-Beziehung" - the topics actually assigned to the latter appeared at clicking the first keyword ... and: the
second keyword was on the same level as the first, no regular assigning it to the top level keyword ...

I had to fix that after importing the project into Flare ... now it works.

[NorthEast]

JJMC - although you can't copy and paste, there's much smarter ways you could generate your image files.

For example, if you save the document from Word as a htm file, it will generate files for all the images in the document.
Alternatively you could import the Word document into Flare, which would then generate all the image files for you.

[NorthEast]

I do know that it still has a problem with the GIF output, so you'd have to save them as PNGs, which aren't as small as GIFs, but are supported in browsers (although IE6 doesn't display the transparencies correctly).

Capture has its good points, but I wouldn't actually recommend it at all for image processing. It doesn't handle transparencies in any image format (GIF, PNG), and its GIF output is very poor (speckled).

What it is good for is capturing images, adding captions, and integration with Flare. But if you want to process/convert images there are much better free tools out there.

[LTinker68]

Capture has its good points, but I wouldn't actually recommend it at all for image processing. It doesn't handle transparencies in any image format (GIF, PNG), and its GIF output is very poor (speckled).

See, I hadn't played with it in a long time, except to check to see if each update had fixed the speckling of GIFs. That really annoyed me, so I haven't been as gung-ho to try its other features. I didn't know it had a problem with transparencies. That's definitely a problem.

Just a reminder to anyone reading this post, if you want clean GIFs and the capability to work with transparent images in Capture, then submit a feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx. The more who complain, the faster it'll get fixed.

FWIW, I use SnagIt to make screen captures. You can leave it running while you run your app and easily capture the whole screen or part of it. And SnagIt remembers where you last saved a file, or you can tell it where to save the file, so you don't have to navigate to the Images folder in your Flare project every time you want to save a screen capture.

[JJMC]

Dave,

The problem really is one of ease of use. The help file was basically already made for what we called version 5 of our product, and now there were many changes for version 6. I don't think Importing is a good idea when the help structure is already there. Also, much of the text, etc. wasn't changed, although quite a bit also was changed. So it was my job to go through the changes made by the manual people (they would either highlight the changes and/or I would use the Word compare features) and update the differences. If a picture changed, it would be easiest for me to just take the picture and copy/paste it over the old one. Now, you could say that the manual people could have made a file for me, but then they are just having to do that and then send me the files, and then I still have to put them in the correct dir and find out which file is for which picture, and select Import | Picture or whatever. All of it is easy of course, but more time consuming then it would need to be.

I don't want to take this topic too far off topic, but in general that is my biggest issue with Flare - if you take a fairly complex document in Word - say it has text, tables, pictures, many different styles, etc. - it seems to me like I could Select All, Copy and Paste into RoboHelp and it would come in close to 100% correct looking. In Flare, you won't even get close because the pictures don't work first of all. As far as tables go, in 5.x, you get the dialog when you try to paste a table in, but I don't know if all the formatting is held, etc (I have mostly used 3.x). Honestly, I don't even want a dialog in that case - I want the table pasted in as it was in Word. Complex tables can be enough of a pain in Flare that I have gone to viewing them 100% in word, and saving the screen shot and cutting out the table and importing it as a picture - of course, I know this means users won't be able to copy and paste from them, but that's Ok for the most part anyways.

I think I added a feature request probably quite a long time ago about being able to Copy/Paste pictures, but in reality the feature request I would really want would be that I should be able to take a Word Document, Select All and Copy and Paste into a Flare topic and have it show up 99+% as it appears in Word. In Robohelp I had the expected work of making topics, adding HelpIDs, etc. but making the actual help from the Word docs was very easy - Flare has added much more work to doing this. Sorry if I seem frustrated - I did within the last few weeks complete our help which I checked is about 2500 topics with about 600 pictures.

JJMC

[Andrew]

I can understand your frustration! Nothing more aggravating than a product not doing what works best for you, and forcing you to manually do things which should be automated.

However, in my opinion, if you want to use Word as your source editor (which is basically what you are doing), you should either roundtrip in Flare using imports, or use RoboHelp. You are trying to use Flare the way you use RoboHelp, and Flare isn't RoboHelp. It has different strengths and weaknesses, and difference workflows. There are ways to use Flare as a help-generator for Word-based docs, but copy / paste isn't it.

We used to use Word for all of our PDFs and all of our help. We switched to Flare for all of them, and I'm very happy we did...Word isn't a good single-sourcing / multi-channel documentation tool (though it can certainly work effectively in many cases).

[JJMC]

Andrew,

Thanks for the response. I think you are probably correct about that not being the correct mix of tools to use. The problem is that our manual people oversees use Word extensively and aren't likely to switch anytime soon, and I was told that I was required to switch to Madcap. Some of the people over me are aware of the extra time I have had to spend, some may not fully understand how much it has been.

I don't think that it's realistic that the manual people would switch to MadCap for the Printed documentatiion/PDFs - some of the tables. pictures, etc. get quite complex and I'm sure they are very used to just using Word and then making the PDF. One thing we would actually consider if we found a good way to do it would be to just have Context Sensitive help call up the Appropriate page of the appropriate PDF (again, the help right now is kind of a mix of about 6 manuals - then there are other "maintenance" type manuals that aren't in the help as they don't pertain to the software much). That would save us alot of effort as well as long as it worked good.

JJMC

[Andrew]

Just to make sure I was clear, I think you *could* use Flare if you want to use Word for source files (as you seem to now) -- it depends on exactly what you need from your online help. If you are doing what many folks who use Word for help do, your online help looks similar to a dump of your manuals into HTML Help, with probably some more topic divisions.

I would probably play around with importing Word files into a (clean, new, shiny) project to see how much I could automate with the import process. Depending on what you're doing, you may be able to do a comparatively small amount work inside Flare, and simply maintain the "source" Word files, and reimport as needed. Obviously, how reasonable such a process is depends on your requirements, but that's what I'd look at if I couldn't either continue using RoboHelp or move entirely into Flare.

[forfear]

I do know that it still has a problem with the GIF output, so you'd have to save them as PNGs, which aren't as small as GIFs, but are supported in browsers (although IE6 doesn't display the transparencies correctly).

Capture has its good points, but I wouldn't actually recommend it at all for image processing. It doesn't handle transparencies in any image format (GIF, PNG), and its GIF output is very poor (speckled).

Noted. I always try to use PNGs to workaround this - when i have control over the graphics formats in all our projects.

[forfear]

I think I added a feature request probably quite a long time ago about being able to Copy/Paste pictures, but in reality the feature request I would really want would be that I should be able to take a Word Document, Select All and Copy and Paste into a Flare topic and have it show up 99+% as it appears in Word. In Robohelp I had the expected work of making topics, adding HelpIDs, etc. but making the actual help from the Word docs was very easy - Flare has added much more work to doing this. Sorry if I seem frustrated - I did within the last few weeks complete our help which I checked is about 2500 topics with about 600 pictures.

JJMC

I've added this request a few times as well. The whole idea is to get Copy/Paste working as seamlessly as possible in Flare with every other Windows product. Understandably its an XML editor and decent one enough at that - getting Copy/Paste to work the way it should would be sweet!

Viva la revolution!