Inserting graphics and screenshots

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Inserting graphics and screenshots

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You can insert graphics in your projects from files stored on your hard disk or with cut & paste. Drag & drop from the desktop or Windows Explorer is not supported.

Note that although cut & paste may be more convenient you may get slightly better image quality when you insert graphics directly from files. This applies particularly to pasting from MS Word, which generally resizes the image very slightly (just a couple of percent) when you copy it via the Windows clipboard.

 

prod_tip       Productivity Tip

When inserting a graphic in a paragraph with text always type a space as the first character after the graphic, this will prevent the image caption style from being applied to the text you type.

Click to expand/collapseHow to insert a graphic from a file

1.Click in the editor at the position where you want to insert the graphic.

2.Select Insert > Image in the Write tab. displays the Open Image dialog:

dlg_openimage

Alignment can make text wrap around the image (not displayed in editor, does not work in PDF).

Padding adds empty space around the image (in pixels). You can set values for individual sides with BTN_Browse.

Zoom resizes the image, Autosize returns it to the default size.

Tooltip is a text displayed when the mouse pointer is over the image.

Caption is displayed below the image (formatted with the Image Caption style) and is included as the ALT attribute in HTML-based image formats.

You don't need to worry about entering the pixel dimensions of your graphic as you would have to do in an HTML editor. Help & Manual does this automatically.

Click to expand/collapseSeparate padding values for each side

You can set separate padding values for each side of the image by entering multiple values in the Padding field. The easiest way to do this is with the popup menu displayed when you click on BTN_Browse in the Padding: field.

You can set the values manually: For all four sides (1 value), vertical and horizontal sides (2 values) or each side individually (4 values). The values apply in the same way as HTML values, clockwise from the top – i.e. top right bottom left.

Padding setting

Effect

10

Sets the same padding value for all four sides of the image,.

10 15

Sets padding to 10 pixels for top and bottom and 15 pixels for left and right

10 25 15 5

Top: 10 pixels, Right: 25 pixels, Bottom: 5 pixels, Left: 15 pixels

Help & Manual 5 compatibility:
When you edit a HM6 project containing multiple padding values with Help & Manual 5 only the first value will be used! However, editing and saving with version 5 will not delete your multiple padding values. They will still be available the next time you edit in version 6.

Click to expand/collapseInserting graphics from unsupported formats

You can also insert unsupported graphics formats by opening them in a graphics program that supports them and copying them to the Windows clipboard. Then just paste the clipboard contents in the Help & Manual editor. You will be prompted to save in an external file and you can then choose the format you want to save in.

Click to expand/collapseHow to insert a graphic with Cut & Paste

1.Copy the graphic to the Windows clipboard in the source program.

2. Click in the editor at the position where you want to insert the graphic and press Ctrl+V or select Clipboard > Paste in the Write tab.

3.You will be prompted to save the graphic in an external file.

4.Give the image a descriptive name and save it in your project's graphics folder rather than the main project folder.

5.To edit the graphic insertion properties double-click on the graphic to reopen the Open Image dialog.

Click to expand/collapseHow to format the image caption

The formatting of the caption text is controlled by a standard style called Image Caption. You can change this for the entire project by editing the style.

You can also change the appearance of the caption text by applying font attributes directly. To do this select the graphic in the editor, then select the font attribute you want to apply (bold, underlined, font etc).

Note that you can only format the entire caption text. You cannot apply different font attributes to individual parts of the text. For more details see Image caption and comment styles.

See also:

Graphics, Videos and OLE (Reference)