Help Activity Refresh/Image Template Guide

(From Mike Lee)

This ODG drawing file has two pages in it. The first page has for an example my redo of Cherry's Browse toolbar screenshot with annotations from Browse chapter. You can open a .odg file in OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and some other drawing programs.

I merged the differences between Caryl and Cherry's callout styles setting the labels Arial in Open Office "Light Blue" at 10 point. The arrows are in the concave arrow head style that Caryl used and colored in Open Office "Light Red." The arrow line width is 0.3" and the arrow head width is 0.16".

The full or cropped screenshot is placed with the command Insert > Picture > From File...

A full screenshot can be cropped using the tool in Open Office Draw.

The text box for the labels is linked to the base of the red arrows so they move together (but they are not grouped). I suggest shift-clicking on the desired pre-made label and arrow combo, then copy and paste to near the desired location. Open Office has its own quirks in that the arrow tip does not seem to snap to the grid. The text label needs to be selected and nudged in place. Then the tip of the arrow is selected and dragged to align. It's a fiddly process.

The template dimensions are set to a width of 7.35" and an arbitrary height of 8.5". The default DPI value in Open Office turns out to be 109. So when a page is selected for export to PNG, the width of 7.35" ends up being exactly 800 pixels wide.

To export to PNG, select the desired drawing page, then File > Export... In the next dialog, select PNG in the dropdown with Auto File Extension checked. The dialog after that, set compression to 0 and Interlaced unchecked.

I've attached a sample of the PNG output un-cropped and cropped. I did the cropping in Photoshop, but anyone who needs free and open can crop using Gimp.

In developing this template, I realize that only someone who is really experienced in a program like Powerpoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Inkscape or Open Office Draw will bother to go through all these steps. Most people will tend to use whatever tool they know to make the annotations and generate flat bitmap graphics

(Written by Mike Lee)