hotspot with colored border

Nothing is perfect! This is where you can post your ideas and wishes for functions you'd like to see in Help & Manual. Current version only please (H&M7).

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Petra Zamburek
Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Jul 19, 2005 9:33 am
Location: Austria - Vienna

hotspot with colored border

Unread post by Petra Zamburek »

Hi,

we would like to have a colored border for a hotspot.
2 reasons for that whish:

1) our main target is (unfortunately) pdf and not webhelp (though we deliver both).
In pdf you can't see a hotspots (as in webhelp), you only notice it when the mouse is moving over the hotspot.
So the user has to move the mouse all over the screenshot to find them.
If we can select a color for the border of a hotspot, you can see them in pdf without moving the mouse (on paper you can't see them at all).

2) Each chapter starts with a full screenshot of the application, which is being documented, some of them are almost full sized.
Within the description we often reference fields, buttons etc. (which are marked with hotspots anyway)
For these references we use a different format so that the user knows, this is an object he can find on the screenshot.
To help him to find the field, button etc., we would like to have a colored border for the hotspot

At the moment we take a screenshot, add colored frames for each hotspot we want to define (and we want to "weak" link to from within the text by formatting a word), and then define the hotspot.
So it's a bit of double work ...

Also it would be nice to have a choice for the color.
So we could use different colors for different objects (e.g. we use red for fields, blue for buttons etc.)

Thanks in advance
Petra
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Tim Green
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Re: hotspot with colored border

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Petra,

This is an interesting idea for PDF. We will definitely consider it. :)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Tobias Escher
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Re: hotspot with colored border

Unread post by Tobias Escher »

+1 from me! That would be incredibly useful for our documentation, too!
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Alexander Halser
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Re: hotspot with colored border

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

I wonder if a project-wide setting for an image hotspot color would be sufficient? After all, hotspots will have different backgrounds and the general color might not work for some backgrounds.

Such a general hotspot option could be switched on for an entire project, which is a huge advantage. Having differently colored hotspots requires editing every hotspot manually.
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
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Petra Zamburek
Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Jul 19, 2005 9:33 am
Location: Austria - Vienna

Re: hotspot with colored border

Unread post by Petra Zamburek »

Hi,

thanks for the suggestion, but I'm afraid that will not be enough for our needs.
Not all of the hotspots need a colored frame only those, who are referenced by the text.

e.g. the screenshot contains many hotspots, one hotspot is defined for a datafield named "ZIPCode".
Describing the ZIPCode there is text like "bla bla ... enter a ZIPCode for ... bla bla".
A consultant wants us to highlight such objects within the screenshot to "help" the user of the manual to find what's meant by ZIPCode.

Not all of our hotspots are referenced by text, so we just have to hightlight those, who are referenced somewhere in the text.
As I know that such requests are usually not the end, I fear that the next step is that we have to use different colors for different objects: datafields are red, buttons are blue and so on.

A project-wide setting would be an improvement, but as you stated: what if we define the yellow and there is a screenshot with a background color in yellow?
Of course a highlighting of all hotspots would be a great benefit in pdf!

Editing every hotspot is no problem, because we have to define the hotspots anyway. It would be easier to define the color as an option than to open the screenshot in an editor, inserting all frames and then doing all the hotspots ...
Do you know what i mean?

regards,
Petra
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itexnz
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Location: Wellington, New Zealand
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Re: hotspot with colored border

Unread post by itexnz »

This would also be a solution to my earlier wish ... (https://helpman.it-authoring.com/viewto ... 34&t=13937) where I currently have to make multiple copies of the same image and highlight different areas using snagit for the context of different pages in an instruction manual. I could just have one image and use different hotspot highlighting. This is especially important for documenting a software product that changes all the time, I can just update one screenshot and maybe need to tweak the hotspots... instead of having to remake twenty screenshots with snagit highlights just because the lead programmer decided to change an icon. grrr! :)
David Scott
Documentation Infrastructure Consultant
https://www.sourceone.co.nz
SourceOne. Documentation, engineered.
Simon Dismore
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Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: hotspot with colored border

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

I suggested supporting SVG fragments in images a while back.

The idea is that an SVG file can draw over a screenshot, and the drawing can be styled using CSS :target syntax. For example, I have a file highlightgroup.svg which refers to "screenshot-1.png". In the SVG file there's a rectangle with the ID "mediabutton". By default, the rectangle is hidden by "display: none;", but when it is targeted using the fragment identifier highlightgroup.svg#mediabutton, it is styled with "display: block" and becomes visible. It's included in the group "#left" which is in the group "#all", and those have their own styles. This approach allows a very wide variety of highlights to be applied, including arcs, arrows, text etc... basically anything you can do in SVG, you can do "over" a screenshot. And of course if the screenshot is later updated, or is one of a family of identical layouts, the same SVG markup can be re-used. This is ideal for incorporating client-specific screenshots with standard overlays. You could use variables to identify the ID to be targeted, which would allow for static versions (pdf, docx, epub) to be generated with "all" or "none" of the highlights if necessary.

Here's a demo:
svg-screenshot-highlightgroups.gif

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<svg version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" x="0px" y="0px"
	 width="494px" height="129px" viewBox="-102 -2 494 129" >
<defs>
  <style>
    .mygroup { fill: none; stroke: green; stroke-width: 2; }
    .myhighlight { display: none; fill: none; stroke: red; stroke-width: 2; }
    .myhighlight:target { display: block; fill: inherit; stroke: red; stroke-width: inherit; }
    .mygroup:target .myhighlight { display: block; fill: inherit; stroke: inherit; stroke-width: inherit; }
  </style>
</defs>
<g>
  <image style="overflow:visible;" width="394" height="129" id="ribbon" xlink:href="screenshot-1.png" />
  <g class="mygroup" id="all">
    <g class="mygroup" id="left">
        <rect class="myhighlight" id="linkbutton" x="11" y="9" width="37" height="69" />
        <rect class="myhighlight" id="imagebutton" x="54" y="9" width="42" height="69" />
        <rect class="myhighlight" id="mediabutton" x="102" y="9" width="42" height="69" />
        <rect class="myhighlight" style="stroke:purple; fill: #FFFF00; fill-opacity: 0.1;" id="tablebutton" x="150" y="9" width="42" height="69" />
    </g>
    <g class="mygroup" id="right">
        <rect class="myhighlight" id="variablebutton" x="202" y="9" width="70" height="21" />
        <rect class="myhighlight" id="snippetbutton" x="202" y="33" width="70" height="21" />
        <rect class="myhighlight" id="togglebutton" x="202" y="57" width="70" height="21" />
    </g>
  </g>
</g>
</svg>
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