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You know, sometimes a picture is indeed worth a thousand words and if you're
scrolling through text in a help system, sometimes it's just easier to understand
what you're reading if you could only see it.
So in those cases it's nice to know there is a nice little integration here in
RoboHelp with something called RoboScreenCapture.
It allows you to capture any portion of your screen, any window, and add it to
your project seamlessly.
That's what we're going to do right now with our Using LDC project.
We'll start by going to the Managing Your Account TOC book and clicking the
Plus sign to expand that, and let's go down to Reactivating your Account and
double-click there.
So there is some text about reactivation, and it talks about clicking on the
Reactivate option, or link, here.
And if you're not sure where that is or what it looks like, wouldn't it be nice
to add a little picture of that?
Well, all you really need to do is open up your web browser and go to the spot
that you want to copy.
In this case, it's the reactivate link that appears in the top-right corner of
the lynda.com homepage.
We'll go back to our project now, and here let's just click around where we want
the graphic to appear, the screen capture.
We'll just click here after the word 'submit' and the period.
All right, next it's time to capture that portion of the screen.
So in this case we go to the Insert menu, and you'll notice Screen Capture
appears right there.
When we click Screen Capture we get to give it a file name. By default it's just
going to be called Capturedimg1, but we can type over that.
Let's say it is the Reactivate option or link.
It's going to be saved as a GIF file format.
There are other options here, JPEG, higher resolution if you wanted to, but
low-res GIF is going to work nicely for our sample.
So we'll click OK, and watch what happens.
RoboHelp just disappears.
You'll see the last thing you were looking at. In our case, you can see we're
looking at the lynda.com web site. And now we're going to see something here
about RoboScreenCapture.
Now for me I'm using programs that use hot keys and some of them are conflicting
with RoboScreenCapture.
You probably don't see this message.
I do and I have to click OK to acknowledge I won't have access to those hot
keys, but that's okay because we can do it all by clicking and using the menus.
Then we see RoboScreenCapture.
It launches automatically, and this is probably what you saw right away, and a blank screen.
So what are we going to capture? That's up to us.
We click the Capture menu here in RoboScreenCapture.
We could capture the full screen.
Notice the hot keys over here on the right-hand side, or shortcuts, for doing that.
A virtual desktop, maybe it's a separate window or a control that's open, a
specific button. In our case we want to be able to select the region, so we'll
go down to Region and click there.
Now RoboScreenCapture disappears temporarily, and our mouse pointer is turned
into this crosshair, and in the bottom right-hand corner you'll see, when you're
up here, a little preview of what that's looking like, zoomed right in. And as
you move around, if you go to the right-hand side of your screen, that preview
moves over to the left-hand side, and so on.
But this is what we want up here, the reactivate link, and let's us get some of the context.
So I'm going to go above subscribe, reactivate, log in, and just to the left of
the field for searching, What would you like to learn?
Then we'll click once and let go and just move your mouse across and down to
encompass everything you want to capture.
Once you've got it, give it a click, and you can see you are back into
RoboScreenCapture now, looking at what you just captured. That's perfect!
That will look good in our help system, so when we're done with Screen
Capture we can actually just close it up. We'll be prompted, do we want to save
those changes? Click Yes.
It saves your changes, closes it up, and look at that, we're at the image window
here where we see a screen capture called Reactivate.gif.
It's being added to our project file. All we have to do is click OK, and it's
inserted right where our cursor was flashing, and like any other graphic now,
we can manipulate it.
So for example, if we want it over on the left-hand side and text wrapping
around all sides, we could do that. Just double-click it. It gets you into the image
window where you can start doing things like adjusting text wrapping.
So our image is on the left. You could size it, if you want to size it up or down.
We'll keep the aspect ratio this time.
Let's just bump up our width to 400.
You can see the height is increased to 87. Click OK, click OK again, and we see
those changes right there in front of us.
To see what that looks like, we can preview it, Ctrl+W, and you can see what the
reactivate link looks like as you're reading about it in the help topic.
I'll close up our preview, and that's all there is to integrating with RoboScreenCapture.