Option to prevent image resampling for WebHelp

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Simon Dismore
Posts: 454
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Option to prevent image resampling for WebHelp

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

Scaling images in HM will eliminate transparency, among other things because the component needs to convert to True Color to do the scaling, so any indexed colors get lost in translation.
(in Transparent images not tranparent in tables)
It might be useful to have an option to skip image resampling when publishing to WebHelp. Modern browsers seem to do a reasonable job of scaling. In any case, if the browser isn't displaying images 1:1 (e.g. as discussed in the Firefox 22 screen dpi thread), this results in scaling by both H&M and the browser.

Proposal:
  • Add a new checkbox to project Configuration : Publishing Options : Webhelp : HTML Export Options, above "Display toggle images in a lightbox overlay".
  • Label/sense at your discretion (I expect you'll want the default behavior to remain unchanged for earlier projects)
  • Purpose is to enable/disable the automatic generation of resized images.
  • Update the help docs to explain that scaling in the H&M Editor has this side-effect of losing transparency.
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Tim Green
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Re: Option to prevent image resampling for WebHelp

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Simon,

Agreed, and this is actually long overdue. This, and the fact that image toggles still use separate images for both states, are a legacy of the bad old days when browser rendering of resized images was horrifically bad at best. Now there is no longer really any reason at all to do it, particularly in light of the fact that resized images are often larger files than the originals, both because they need to be increased to TrueColor and because the fuzziness introduced by resizing compresses much less well. You can expect to see an overhaul of this in the next major version of HM. :)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Simon Dismore
Posts: 454
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Option to prevent image resampling for WebHelp

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

Tim Green wrote:You can expect to see an overhaul of this in the next major version of HM.
This could be useful for something I'm working on, so just to say I'm crossing my fingers... :)
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