Yes, you're right about images looking bad when they get
really small. The reason I'm doing the re-size with JS is to, if at
all possible, use the full image size and avoid horizontal
scrollbars at all costs.
In the project I'm doing this for, the screen shots in
question are full-size captures of an application-screen that was
designed for 800x600 -- Ideally the user is farmiliar with the
screen so they can probably see through the crappiness. Usually one
can get the jist of what the image looks like as long as the width
stays around 70% or greater. So for a user with the dreaded
800x600, if they open up the help window (I think it goes to about
600 width in my setup), it looks fine...
If I'm scaling with RoboHelp, it has the same effect as doing
it with JavaScript -- each modifies the underlying CSS, one
dynamically the other when the screen loads... both call the
browser's compression algorithm. Actually I started out scaling the
images with RoboHelp, but I found that if I specified percentages,
the height wouldn't change and the image would lose the
height/width ratio and look real bad. If I were to scale them down
using an image-scaling program, sure they may look better for the
handful of users with 800x600, but if the user DOES has a decent
resolution (which 80% of the people im dealing with do), I'd like
them to see the full-size.
Yes I'm guilty of using extravagant JavaScript to fix, when
it really comes down to it, a non-issue. I think this has been more
of a "see if JavaScript plays nice with RoboHelp" exercise -- to
see if I could do something dynamic using a single script file,
hooked up to RoboHelp with minimal effort.