images in Word output

[RonenSigan]

Hi,
The images in the word output r of poor quality compared to other outputs (PDF, HTML). Is there any way to improve their quality?

Thanks

[SteveS]

First question...

Is there any resizing going on, or are your images larger than the usable area on the word page causing word to resize the image? (Use the Picture Tools -> Format -> Size command when an image is selected to see if it 100%/ 100% to check).

[Tim]

I've run into this as well, and it's quite frustrating.

The group I'm working with distributes a Word version of the guide that I'm producing in Flare (since we also publish a version to the web).

So I enter everything into Flare, create a Word target, generate the Word target, then manually add in a title page, adjust the Table of Contents (which I could not easily determine how to figure out how to specify in Flare - i.e., I want specify 'Contents' as the title of the TOC, omit the 'Contents' title from the TOC itself, and set the color).

I sent out the draft, then got numerous complaints of the image quality - all the graphics were very blurry and not at all crisp. I'm not sure of any resizing; I don't think there was any, since I set the sizes in Photoshop. I do have a "height:auto" on the style of the img tags, so if the web version is viewed on a lower resolution screen, the image will be resized appropriately.

I wound up having to drag in all the images manually to get the crisp images.

Is there anything that I can force Flare to put in the high-res graphics (that is, just insert the actual graphics file) into the Word document, and not do any kind of compression or whatever is happening? It's a big time sink...

[RonenSigan]

Thanks for the replies - all the image resizing is done in Flare and not in Word.

[Tim]

Thanks for the replies - all the image resizing is done in Flare and not in Word.

Is there a way to disable the resizing, and to instruct Flare to insert the image into the Word output 'as-is'?

[ElaineB]

I am having the same issue, though not so much the resolution as the image that is part of a table row comes over into Word but it does not "fill" the whole table row. We wind up with a table heading with text that looks great for the first table row, and then the 2nd row with the image has the image smaller. I reset the size to fill the row. Doesn't work. I resize the image in both Flare and Word. It works if I manually reset the image in Word but that's not ideal for every single time we do this. It looks fine in Flare and looks fine in Flare preview, but in Word it looks like a tinier size image that does not fill the table row/cell like we want.

Any thoughts?

Elaine

[Tim]

Does this mean there is no way to retain the original resolution and quality of the pictures output to Word (meaning I have to spend a lot of time manually replacing images in a Word document produced by Flare, which kind of defeats the purpose of using a single-source tool to produce documentation in different formats), or there is a way that no one's posted?

[BrianBXYPRO]

I've been having this issue with Word too. (No issues in HTML5, PDF, or CHM files.)

Is there a way to disable the resizing, and to instruct Flare to insert the image into the Word output 'as-is'?

I've developed a very inelegant solution to do this. What I did is create two conditions for images: Word and NotWord. For the NotWord condition I do what I normally would. For example, I import the image, set the set the online version to popup, and for the print outputs I set maximum sizes as needed.

For the Word condition I import the image and then do absolutely nothing else. That last part is critical because if I set anything on the Print Size tab the image will come out blurry in Word. I'm not sure if this is workable for you but it's become a necessity for me. (I had your issue about reviewers complaining about image quality.)

Brian

[SteveS]

All of my work is done in Word...

One of the things I do is try to do all my processing in a graphics package, such as snagit or something similar.

I do not want any resizing to occur, so I take my screenshots at Window's native resolution (96 dpi) and do not change this. Note that some packages will change the resolution to 72 dpi if you're not careful. The curl page effect in snagit will do this, and I've had it happen with some adobe products.

If my image is too wide (or tall) I will crop the image to 550px (fits our Word page layout). Still not changing the size (resolution) of the base image. With a bit of creativity there are not many images you can't crop.

If I have to resize the base image, usually a whole of window grab, I'll try to resize it to a round percentage, such as 80%. Use the graphics package to resample the image, you'll get a better result than manually resizing by dragging border handles. After resampling run an unsharp filter over the resampled image (which actually sharpens it, despite the name). Try different strengths to get the best result.

Note that sometimes Word will do silly things with images, although it shows as 100% of original it is slightly blurry. Resetting the image returns it to clarity, so I have a macro that resets all full sized images and use it as part of finalising my work.

Another tip is to print the output to judge quality, print preview isn't always accurate...

HTH