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As I understand your problem, the labels in your screenshot went to heck
when you went from FrameMaker to HTML. This may be a conversion from GIF
to JPEG. It may also be resizing or some other artifact of the
"pipeline" your graphics went through on their way from the app to your
doc.
Because of the algorithm JPEG uses, a loss in resolution on sharp-edged
picture elements like fonts may occur. On the other hand, the loss may
be due to resizing.
I wasn't going to get into resizing, but...
I *always* do the screenshot in *exactly* the same size that the image
will appear on a *printed* page. That is, if my screenshot is going into
a 4" x 4" square in FrameMaker, then I take the shot as 4" x 4". That is
the *only* way to get text strings in the shot itself to display
legibly.
Native Visio files are stored in vector format, as are Illustrator
files. I am not sure about Paint Shop Pro; it does vector drawings, but
I don't know how they're stored in PSP's own format (which I never use).
In vector format, shapes are not stored as sets of pixels. Instead,
they're stored as instructions that tell some piece of hardware how to
draw the shape. These instructions can be scaled without losing
information, so vector drawings scale very nicely.
TrueType/OpenType and "Adobe" fonts are "vector" fonts. The font
information is stored as a set of optimized instructions for drawing all
the lines, curves, etc. in each glyph. This makes these fonts very
scaleable. In comparison, "system" or "raster" fonts are stored as sets
of pixels. The scaling (if you can call it that) is done by having
multiple sets of pixels, one for each point size! Some raster fonts
don't even do that; you either get a very limited set of point sizes, or
you get results that don't look like letters.
Any paint program that allows you to put text strings into the picture
is adding the text as vector fonts and then converting (rasterizing)
them to bitmap. I know that for Visio or Illustrator this doesn't happen
until you save the image as a bitmap-only image. For this reason, you
should *never* resize an image once you've rasterized the fonts in it.
Joe Malin
Technical Writer
(408)625-1623
jmalin -at- tuvox -dot- com
www.tuvox.com
The views expressed in this document are those of the sender, and do not
necessarily reflect those of TuVox, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Hickling, Lisa (TOR) [mailto:lhickling -at- Express-Scripts -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 10:24 AM
To: Joe Malin; Techwr-L
Subject: graphics
As usual, you nailed that differentiation, Joe. My pain is still fresh
from looking at GIF captures that WWeP auto-converted to JPEG. None of
the labels are legible since JPEG lost the font outlines in the
conversion.
Whose idea was it over there at Quadralay to default anchored frame
contents to JPEG? No offence to my fellows who capture colour-rich
graphics all day but (dare I say) most of us are into screencaps. So,
show me the GIFs!
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