How ScreenSteps Deals With Large Images

When you work with ScreenSteps you will notice that after you capture an image it appears to be smaller within ScreenSteps than it was when you capture it. Because the content are of the formats you export to are often smaller than the screenshots you take, ScreenSteps can scale your screenshots to fit within a predefined width while authoring. By doing this, your annotated image will not need to be scaled when exporting. This results in crisper annotations.

The percentage that an image is scaled by appears right below the image in the authoring environment (1).

You can change the percentage at any time by clicking on the arrow next to the percentage. This will display the menu of options for scaling (2). For more information about this menu please see this lesson.

Note: ScreenSteps will always store the original image you capture. Scaling only occurs while authoring and exporting.

ScreenSteps has preference settings that allow you to automatically scale all images you capture to a specific width and height. By default, ScreenSteps will scale all images that are over 560 pixels wide. If you prefer to always have your images appear at 100% of their actual size then you can uncheck the checkbox for the "Scale Images on Capture" preference.

ScreenSteps may also scale your images when it comes time to export.

For PDF output an image will be scaled if it is too wide to fit in the available width. The height is sometimes scaled to make the image fit on the page as well.

For Word output, the full image is included and the editor you use to view the document will provide any necessary scaling.

When using an HTML template to export, the Maximum Image Width setting for the template you export with is used. As you can see in this picture, the maximum image width for this template is 560 pixels. If you have any images in your lesson that are wider than 560 pixels then they will be scaled to fit within 560 pixels. An HTML template can specify that the full-size image should be included as well. In this case ScreenSteps will also include the full size version so that the user can click on a link to view it.

So why does ScreenSteps allow you to scale images during authoring and exporting? The reason is that if you scale an image during export then the image annotations will be scaled as well. The annotations will not be as large as they appear in the ScreenSteps editor and scaling can result in annotations that are not as crisp as they would otherwise be if they had not been scaled.