How to Handle Pictures and Graphics

To help make your document more understandable, you will probably want to include as many pictures and graphics as possible. These are widely regarded as one of the trickiest components to get right in your documentation, because of the complex considerations involved. We will be adding more discussion of those considerations in later releases of this Guide. Most of them concern making sure you have the correct number of colors, resolution, and graphic file format for your document's different output media. Graphics usually take a lot of time to create, so you'll have to balance that against their superiority as a communication device in some situations.

Author-it's File Object Handles Your Graphics

The Author-it File object has been designed to handle your graphics for you, reducing the difficulties as much as possible.

The File object lets you specify where to get the source graphic file from - it can even be a different one for each output media. You can also specify what output file format the graphic should be published in, and other options like scaling and captions - also different for each output medium if you like. You can either keep the graphic source file outside your Library database (linked), or store the graphic file inside the Library (embedded).

Excluding Graphics

You can even exclude graphics from some output media. For example, in this Guide we did not include graphics in most procedural topics of our Help output, because you will usually be looking at the screen when using the procedure, and excluding graphics also minimizes the file size of the Help system.