Add an Automation Interface to Impict

This section is for suggesting features and capabilities that you would like to see in Impict, Help & Manual's integrated screenshot editor and enhancer.

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Uwe Raabe
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Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2005 12:53 pm
Location: Germany

Add an Automation Interface to Impict

Unread post by Uwe Raabe »

I would even pay for such a feature! :wink:
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Uwe,

Are you referring to the Impict program itself or the screen capture feature? I ask because in your postings about this on the forum you seemed to be referring mainly to screen capture.
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.
Uwe Raabe
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2005 12:53 pm
Location: Germany

Unread post by Uwe Raabe »

I refer to Impict itself. Actually I'm interested in adding or changing effects and callouts in an IPP file. A conversion utility would also be helpful:

convert IPP <-> XML (may be with references to external BMP files)

convert IPP -> BMP (to include in H&M)

Concerning my example in the other post automating the screenshots for 8 flavours, 16 languages and 300 screenshots would only require to prepare 300 IPP files and let the automation replace the bitmaps, change the positions and texts of the callouts and convert alltogether into the appropriate bitmap.

Automated making the 300 plain screenshots needs about 60 seconds now. Even if you double that for the enhancing, it will run 8x16x120 = 15360 seconds (about 4 hours). I wonder how long any individual needs to make these 38400 bitmaps manually.
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Martin Wynne
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Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Uwe Raabe wrote:Automated making the 300 plain screenshots needs about 60 seconds now. Even if you double that for the enhancing, it will run 8x16x120 = 15360 seconds (about 4 hours). I wonder how long any individual needs to make these 38400 bitmaps manually.
Hi Uwe,

I'm not too sure what you are trying to achieve. But if you want to have different callouts on a screenshot under different conditions, have a look at this topic:

http://helpman.it-authoring.com/viewtop ... 5238#20638

Put the screenshot as the table background. Put the callout(s) in the table cell(s) and put conditional "text" tags round them. If the callout text changes, nest another table in each cell with a blank callout as the background and put the conditional texts in that. You can create as many custom conditions as you need.

regards,

Martin.
Uwe Raabe
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2005 12:53 pm
Location: Germany

Unread post by Uwe Raabe »

Thanks Martin for suggesting this, but this won't solve my problem. The image in the topic your refer to may lead as an example:

Lets assume the dialog in the image is one inside our program. The program is tailored for different customers resulting in some tabs in the dialog are visible or not (depending on the customer). Making things worse, the program comes in different languages for each customer resulting in different lengths of the tab captions. Problem: the position of the callout depends on the customer and the language.

The idea is: the program making the screenshots knows exactly where the callout has to be placed and what the text is in the current language. So if I had the possibility to change the callout's position and content, I'm fine.

As said before: if no automation interface will be available, opening the IPP file format would be OK for me.
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