When generating pictures from your Microsoft Word document, Help Producer will always try to create pictures with the highest quality possible. To accomplish this, Help Producer does not perform any resizing or recompression of the picture, i.e. Help Producer uses the same picture size and compression format as the one used internally by Microsoft Word.

Under certain circumstances, however, it is possible that the pictures in your help file appear of lower quality than the one in your Word document. Often, this happens when a picture is resized. For instance, if you paste a screenshot into your help document and resize it to a smaller size, the image quality may suffer.

The quality loss occurs, because Microsoft Word has to resize the original image, and then recompress it using a lossy compression format, such as JPEG. The scaling and recompression of the picture is necessary due to technical limitations of HTML.

If a generated picture is not of optimal quality, you may be able to improve the picture quality by using the following procedures:

Avoid scaling images

To avoid quality loss of images, try not to resize the image in Microsoft Word. For instance, if you have a screenshot, crop the picture before you paste it into Word to include only the important details. If you must scale the picture, you can try to perform high-quality scaling in a picture manipulation program, and then include it in your Word document.

Also, make sure that the picture fits within the page margins; otherwise it is scaled automatically by Word to fit into your document.

Improving image quality of scaled images

If you cannot avoid resizing your images, you can improve the picture quality by enabling VML. Using this feature, Help Producer can usually save the image in its original dimensions while using a lossless, high-quality compression algorithm, and have the web-browser perform high-quality scaling to the desired size. For certain image types, such as screenshots, the quality may increase dramatically.

VML will only work with web-browsers supporting the VML standard, such as Internet Explorer. Other web-browsers will display the images with the default quality.

Turn on generation of VML code

1. In the Help Producer Project Editor, select Filter, Advanced.
2. Check the box Allow creation of VML code.

Preserve the image compression format

In rare case, Microsoft Word may choose the sub-optimal compression format when an image is pasted from the clipboard. To preserve the compression format of your picture, insert the image directly from a file, instead of pasting it from the clipboard.

Inserting a picture while preserving the compression format

1. Click where you want to insert the picture.
2. On the Insert menu, point to Picture, and then click From File.
3. Locate the picture you want to insert.
4. Double-click the picture you want to insert.

   Note   If you attempt to resize or modify the picture in Microsoft Word, the picture compression format and quality may change. To preserve the original compression format or quality, resize or modify the picture in an external image manipulation program, such as Adobe® Photoshop®, before you insert the picture into your Word document.

See Also

Conversion Problems | Troubleshooting