Images on Robohelp are very poor quality/blurry or don't appear at all

[anielar]

Hello,

Any help on this problem would be greatly appreciated as I have been attempting to solve this for several hours a day for the past week.

I have a simple employee handbook in word (about 20 pages with images) that I’m trying to turn into an html-based document. I've tried a couple if things in order to get this file into robohelp. I've linked the word document to RoboHelp and worked with that, and I've also imported the word doc into framemaker and then linke my framemaker document to Robohelp.

I’ve managed to create the html version with a table of contents doing it both ways, but there are a few images in the word document that turn out really bad in the html version. They look fine in the word document and in pdf version, but when I view them in RoboHelp or  in the html version of the document they’re very blurry and choppy. It almost looks as it pixels are missing. I’ve tried everything I could think of but nothing changes the quality of the image. As soon as I link the word document or framemaker document, when I click "view" on the specific image, or just view it from the handbook in Robohelp the image looks terrible.

Someone suggested that I checkmark "do not re-generate image" under project settings but now some of my images aren't appearing at all. All of my images are the same type but I've also tried changing it to png, or bmp, jpeg but nothing changes. They're either blurry or don't appear at all.

Thanks for any help or suggestions!

[Guest]

Hi,

For such a small document you're probably better off creating from scratch in RoboHELP by copying and pasting the text in and then creating images separately and then import them (suggest Gif formatfor this). You can then create either an HTNL help file or Web Help output.

Hope that helps

[AlbusTeck]

Hello

Could you please confirm which version of RoboHelp and Microsoft Word you are using?

Also please try following and confirm the status:

1. Please try importing rather than then linking and see if the results are same. However these are not the same process but will make sure that the issue is coming during the process.

2. Create a new document with images and try to link that with RoboHelp and see if the results are same. If the images are fine with new documents then the issue might be with the word document.

3. While linking do you see any errors or relevant messages? If yes then please provide that too.

Regards

Adobe Support.

[anielar]

Hello,

Thanks for your responses!

I am using word 2003 and Robohelp 8.

I took a look again at the word document because only some images were turning out really blurry, and some images were turning out perfect. So I looked at both sets of images and realized that the ones that were turning out blurry looked like they were snap-shots. I was unable to speak to the orignal creator of the word document but I'm pretty sure they just took a snap-shop of a page and pasted it into this word document like a picture. The snap-shots had both paragraphs of texts and picture and it was only these snap-shot images that were turning out really bad in RoboHelp. They shouldn't have been taking snap shots of text and pasting them into word as a picture to begin with- text should be typed up in word, so that's something that we can change easily. What I ended up doing was copying the snapshot into PhotoShop and just converting it to JPEG which helped a lot with the image quality. I also typed up most of the text instead of pasting it in like a picture.

I'm not sure if I found the problem, or just got lucky that what I tried worked...? Am I right in assuming that snap-shots of text usually don't turn out well?

I also don't get any error messages or any kind while linking or creating my WebHelp.

Thanks again!

[kmaddox1]

I don't know if this will help you, but I've had issues with poor image quality when importing Word documents into RH7. I see a fuzziness problem with most images--screen shot or not--but it seems really pronounced if the image in Word is reduced to less than 100%. To resolve this, I've opted to manually copy any Word images to another application (I use SnagIt), save them at 100% to PNG format (JPG and GIFs also work), and import the saved image files to Robohelp. That sounds like that's what you ended up doing with Photoshop.

Also, I wonder if it makes a difference how much the text was magnified/reduced when they took the original screen shots. I just did an experiment--using SnagIt, I took a screen capture of a block of text at 100% magnification. I then pasted the screen shot directly from SnagIt into my Robohelp document. It came in perfectly clean--couldn't see any obvious difference between the Robohelp text and the image of the Word text. I got the same results when I saved the screen capture to a PNG file and imported it that way. That leads me to believe the problem you're seeing is a result of having Word images automatically converted to RH.

(In the example--unfortunately hard to see-- the text in the red box is from a screen capture; the rest of the text was entered in RH8--there's no discernable difference in quality.)

[anielar]

Thanks so much Kathy for doing that experiment!

I'm not importing anything into RoboHelp...I'm linking it instead. Maybe that makes a difference also?

But at least I know that text screen-shots should still turn out perfectly in RoboHelp. I saw your attachment and I couldn't see any difference in quality between the text in the box and the text that you typed up- it was actually really good quality.

I think when I have time I'll try importing my original word file and see if that makes a difference in the image quality.