Shape tool causing background to go transparent

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Darren Albert
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Nov 23, 2006 2:25 am

Shape tool causing background to go transparent

Unread post by Darren Albert »

I'm having a weird problem that I could use some help with.

I am converting an existing help guide into H&M. The screenshots already exist as gif's, however when I import them into help and manual they have transparent backgrounds.

What I've been doing is editing them in impact and resaving them to remove the transparency. Whilst I do this editing, I've also been drawing a rectange shape around them to give the screenimage a black border, then resaving the images as a gif and reloading them in H&M. For hundreds of images, this has worked fine.

Suddenly it doesn't. Now when I draw the rectangle, the image looks normal in Impict (ie. screenshot with a black border), but once I reload it in H&M, the background to the image is transparent. If I remove the black border (ie. remove the rectangle shape), and click save, the image once again has it's normal white background.

I've tried messing with a variety of settings, but in the end I can't seem to prevent this from happening. And I have no idea why it suddenly started doing it.

Anyone have any ideas on this? Note that I have Transparency set to 'none'.
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Darren,

I can confirm the behavior. It appears to be a bug in the updated version of Impict or one of its components included with H&M 4.2. The development team is investigating the problem but for the moment you can work around it by saving as .BMP instead of GIF after adding the border to your images. As long as you save with 256 colors the file size won't increase as a result because Help & Manual will automatically convert to the most appropriate format when you compile anyway.

Check your image conversion settings in Project Properties - HTML Help / Browser Help - HTML Export Options. If you don't have any images in your project with more than 256 colors the most effective setting is to convert all bitmaps to PNG. However, if you do have images with more colors PNG will result in very large files, and so that is not such a good idea.

For full details on controlling image size see this guidein the Tips & Tricks section:

http://helpman.it-authoring.com/viewtopic.php?t=4228
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Darren Albert
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Nov 23, 2006 2:25 am

Thanks

Unread post by Darren Albert »

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your response, a good workaround.

Cheers,

Darren
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