Hi Tim,Tim Green wrote: ... One trick I sometimes use is to create a callout without any text, then I can antialias its outline. Then I create a text object with crisp, non antialiased text and position it over the callout.
Thanks for the tip. I hadn't realised what a massive improvement
anti-aliasing makes to the call-out outlines, especially the ellipse.
I'm preparing some tutorials in which most of the text will be in
call-outs on full-screen screenshots. So I wanted to have not only
font-smoothed text, but also formatted rich text in the call-outs.
The obvious solution was to capture it as a bitmap and overlay
a blank call-out.
But I couldn't find a rich-text utility which made it easy to capture
a small area of rich text on a coloured background.
You can do it in H&M of course, but changing the background colour
of an individual topic is a pain, and using a coloured table means
much fiddling about with the cell padding settings to get the required
line lengths. And it's difficult to capture from small re-sized
conventional windows without getting scroll-bars and borders
which then have to be cropped off.
So I wrote a rich-text jotter utility specifically for this purpose, and
I'm quite pleased with it (see screenshots attached).
Doing the call-out text this way means that you can't edit it in Impict,
of course. But it is easy to copy/paste rich text to/from H&M. You
can keep the call-out texts in an invisible topic, or in conditional text
alongside the relevant image. That means that unlike in Impict, it
gets included in the search/replace functions, which is handy. It
doesn't take much longer to copy/paste and capture a fresh bitmap
than to manually edit the call-out text.
If any H&M user would like a copy of the rich-text jotter, please feel
free to download it from:
http://www.85a.ision.co.uk/odds/rich_jotter.zip
Zipped size is 233KB.
regards,
Martin.
