Comments on: New ScreenSteps 2.1 Public Beta http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2008/06/new-screensteps-21-public-beta/ A blog about visual communication Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:59:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: trevordevore http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2008/06/new-screensteps-21-public-beta/comment-page-1/#comment-94 trevordevore Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:06:12 +0000 http://screensteps.com/blog/?p=122#comment-94 <p>When you open the PDF with the Google logo in Preview select "Actual Size" from the contextual menu that appears if you right-click within the viewing area. Your image should then display at the same size as it appears on the Google website. Oddly enough selecting "Actual Size" from the View menu does not give the same result.</p> When you open the PDF with the Google logo in Preview select “Actual Size” from the contextual menu that appears if you right-click within the viewing area. Your image should then display at the same size as it appears on the Google website. Oddly enough selecting “Actual Size” from the View menu does not give the same result.

]]> By: George Andrews http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2008/06/new-screensteps-21-public-beta/comment-page-1/#comment-88 George Andrews Tue, 03 Jun 2008 04:41:53 +0000 http://screensteps.com/blog/?p=122#comment-88 <p>Quote: "Images in PDF output are no longer fuzzy at actual size."</p> <p>Interestingly, I saw no improvement from the current release version to the beta. Here is my test: I opened Google in Safari (I'm on a Mac) and captured the logo and search box using your tool. I also made a copy using Grab and pasted it into Preview. I saved a PDF from ScreenSteps and saved a similar PDF from Preview.</p> <p>In both cases, the image displays larger than the original--even when actual size or 100% is specified. The images can be reduced to approximate the original size, but the degradation of the image, especially the smaller type, is still quite noticeable.</p> <p>I didn't try taking the screen capture through Adobe Acrobat to see what quality I could get there. I did try viewing both test files in both Preview and Adobe Reader. I could live with a bit of fuzziness if the size stayed correct. Google's usual logo is 276 X 110 pixels. The PDF version seems to be about 30% to 40% larger.</p> <p>While the logo was on the clipboard, I pasted it into a new MS Word document and saw the same resizing issue when I saved it as a PDF. I'm guessing this is some common library call to generate PDF output that everyone uses that's wonky. Saving the document in native word format and re-opening it returns a perfect replica of the original screen grab.</p> <p>Bottom line: PDF as a format seems to have some unexpected (to me anyway) limitations.</p> Quote: “Images in PDF output are no longer fuzzy at actual size.”

Interestingly, I saw no improvement from the current release version to the beta. Here is my test: I opened Google in Safari (I’m on a Mac) and captured the logo and search box using your tool. I also made a copy using Grab and pasted it into Preview. I saved a PDF from ScreenSteps and saved a similar PDF from Preview.

In both cases, the image displays larger than the original–even when actual size or 100% is specified. The images can be reduced to approximate the original size, but the degradation of the image, especially the smaller type, is still quite noticeable.

I didn’t try taking the screen capture through Adobe Acrobat to see what quality I could get there. I did try viewing both test files in both Preview and Adobe Reader. I could live with a bit of fuzziness if the size stayed correct. Google’s usual logo is 276 X 110 pixels. The PDF version seems to be about 30% to 40% larger.

While the logo was on the clipboard, I pasted it into a new MS Word document and saw the same resizing issue when I saved it as a PDF. I’m guessing this is some common library call to generate PDF output that everyone uses that’s wonky. Saving the document in native word format and re-opening it returns a perfect replica of the original screen grab.

Bottom line: PDF as a format seems to have some unexpected (to me anyway) limitations.

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