Importing clear, sharp images

[Combs, Richard (CW)]

No, if you import at screen resolution, you're almost always throwing away pixels. Your screen captures typically have to be shrunk to fit on the page in your doc. You want to shrink them by squeezing the existing pixels closer together, not by throwing some of them away.

When you import a screen shot into FM, the Imported Graphic Scaling dialog offers Fit in Selected Rectangle. I don't generally use that, but if you're creating the anchored frame first, you might want to try it. I prefer to specify a nice round dpi (dots per inch) number that goes evenly into the typical laser printer resolutions (probably less important today, but old habits die hard).

The Imported Graphic Scaling dialog also offers several common dpi options (with the dimensions on the page resulting from that dpi setting), and Custom dpi. It also shows you the pixel dimensions of the file you're importing. If none of the listed common dpi settings result in a size you can use, the math to get exactly what you want isn't hard. If the file is, say, 960 pixels wide, and you want it to fit exactly into a 6" wide frame on the page, divide 960 by 6. Set Custom dpi to the result, 160, and you should have a nice, sharp 6" wide screen shot in your doc.

From: Tim Pann [mailto:TPann at telecomsys.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 3:30 PM
To: Combs, Richard (CW); framers
Subject: RE: Importing clear, sharp images

OK this is very interesting. I was under the assumption that you should keep the resolution of the picture at the resolution of the screen, and then import it in also at that resolution. I was not aware that changing the import resolution was advisable.

Off top of my head this seems like it would be difficult to get just the right resolution on the first try giving a particular anchored frame size. Do you have some clever method for getting the resolution right the first time?

Tim
________________________________
From: Combs, Richard (CW) [Richard.Combs at polycom.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 2:24 PM
To: Tim Pann; framers
Subject: RE: Importing clear, sharp images
Don't resize your screen captures! Save as PNG exactly as captured. When you import them into FM, specify the appropriate DPI setting to make them the size you want on the page.

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com<mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com> [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Tim Pann
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 3:11 PM
To: framers
Subject: Importing clear, sharp images

I'm using Frame 9 on Windows 7. And my apologies if this has been covered and answered.

Can anyone point me toward a good resource (or just tell me if it's quick) for understanding how to get nice sharp images imported by reference in FrameMaker? I'm working on a doc right now in which I'm mostly importing PSD files. They're all screen captures of a user interface. I have to resize most of them and they're looking pretty choppy. I switched to a TIF image for one and that didn't help.

I know that TIFF is the preferred format (not sure about PSD but many of my PSD imports look nice) but I don't know if there are specific guidelines or recommendations about resolution, resizing once imported, etc.

I'm happy to provide more information about what I'm doing if needed. No idea what's relevant and what's not.

Thank you,
Tim

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