SUMMARY: Blurry Screen Shots in Word 97

["Thompson, Sarah" <SThompso -at- RESDATA -dot- COM>]

Before I begin, thanks to everybody who replied - I got many good
suggestions, and am feeling much more in control of my documents!  So,
without any further ado, the summary of replies (so far), in no
particular order...

*       Are they blurry on the screen or blurry when printed, or both?
If the former, check what they're like when printed (assuming that print
is your real target).  Most of mine look horrendous on the screen but
Just Fine in the printed doc.

*       Are the images *printing* blurry as well?  That's the key.  Word
97 automatically anti-aliases displayed bitmaps, so they seem a bit
blurry onscreen, but print (or convert to PDF) just fine.

*       [Time spent editing] points to something many people don't think
about: screen shots of dialog boxes generally don't need more than 16 or
32 colours.  However, since they're grabbed on 256-color screens (at
minimum), they take up more space and memory than necessary.  What I
used to do was pop the image into Paint Shop Pro, knock the color depth
down to 4-bit (16 colors), and apply a palette I designed to optimize
the colors for perfect reproduction in print, Windows Help, and PDF.  It
only took a few seconds, but it saved a lot of time and disk space.

*       I use SnagIt for screen grabbing because of its good
pre-cropping features, and PaintShop Pro for further cropping, if
needed. About blurring, see my "Tip of the month" for June '98 about
resizing of bitmaps on
http://www.prc.dk/user-friendly-manuals/ufm/tip-9806.htm.

*       In response to your posting, I thought I would reply and tell
you that I was having the same problem but fixed it quite easily by
ensuring that I used the Paste Special command not just Paste.  Within
the Paste Special command, you can choose what type of format to paste
the screen shot as.

*       what I do is use the built-in screenshot thing in Windows, paste
and crop in Paint.  Then I paste - special them as picture or bitmap,
NOT float over text.  Scales and prints well.  It may waste space, since
they are stored in color but printed in greyscale.

        [*regarding exporting Word to PDF files, and blurry shots on
line*]
*       The PDF problem sounds like it's more of a compression setting
problem, which is pretty common when you're starting out with Acrobat.

*       By the way, registered Adobe owners are entitled to a free
subscription to Adobe magazine; the one of the issues from this year (I
think it was the spring issue) had a nice little explanation of how the
downsampling and subsampling options work in Acrobat.  Recommended
reading.  You can get a subscription from www.adobe.com.

Thanks again to everyone who replied!
st

Sarah Thompson
Resource Data International
sthompso -at- resdata -dot- com

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not;
a sense of humor to console him for what he is."  - Francis Bacon


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