FrameMaker Graphics

[Ami WRIGHT <ami -at- ziplink -dot- net>]

Hi everyone,

I'm setting up processes for the doc department of a small software
company. We use FrameMaker, Paint Shop Pro, and WebWorks. Much of our
documentation gets translated, currently to one language, but possibly to
more later. We provide our documentation as PDF files and WebWorks files
that are included with the software builds. We don't provide hard copy of
anything. We'd like to minimize the size of our FrameMaker files, and
especially of the PDF files, since the PDF files actually get 
distributed.

The current question that I've been working on is standards for graphics. I
did some research on-line, including the techwr-l archives, about what the
options are and what the consequences are of the various options. There
isn't a lot of definitive information, but this is what I've come up with: 
*  Graphics should be linked, not embedded 
*  Format should be GIF 
*  We don't need to save the Paint Shop Pro files after the GIF is created 
*  DPI should be 72 
*  Graphics should be in a standard subdirectory for each document (meaning
all the graphics for a document go in a sub-directory of the FrameMaker
files, and the subdirectory should always have the same name for every
document) 
*  The filenames for graphics do not need to reflect the language (same
filename regardless of the language, but they'll be in different directories) 
*  Try to use short names, to avoid having them munged if we need to zip
everything

If anyone has any experience that suggests that any of those is actually a
bad idea, or has other suggestions that might be better, please let me know.

One thing that I don't really like is that the graphics always need to be
resized to make them small enough to fit the page. I tried resizing in
Paint Shop Pro, but then the screen shots were unreadable. Does anyone have
any suggestions about how to resolve that problem? Do I need to just resign
myself to resizing in FrameMaker every time I place a screen shot?

Thanks, 
-Ami


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Ami Wright
"Technical" tech writer
American with international experience 
www.amiwright.com
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