Of Mice and Men

[Lin Evans]

I've been struggling lately with how to improve my on-line tutorial. One of the issues not only for others but for me as well is that it's exceedingly difficult to read small text and difficult to see the screen captures. There are limits as to how large I can make them and still have reasonable formatting. I use MicroSoft Publisher for several reasons (it's certainly Not the best available tool) including the fact that I can make printable documents as well as html code in one operation.

So how to deal with the relatively tiny print, etc.? In my own copy - perhaps in all copies of Publisher there is a bug which prevents the "view/text size" feature from working properly. When an image is between the text blocks the first one responds and creates nice large text, but everything on the same page below the image block is unaffected. Perhaps this has been corrected in later versions and I'll upgrade this week, but in case it isn't I've found a great solution for all us with less than 20 year old eyes.

Microsoft is making some new "Mice" with a small switch on the left side under your right thumb (for those who are right handed). When you click this switch an adjustable real time "magnifying" glass appears which can easily be adjusted for both frame size and magnification amount. It's a danged NICE feature folks. I've been able to read things on my notebook computer which formerly had be running around looking for my +2 readers to see. This mouse comes in several flavors including a small version for notebooks and is available both in wireless and wired USB formats.

Have a look next time you are in one of the computer stores and if you are having difficulties this could change you life!

Lin

[bharkins]

I don't mind looking at Publisher or any media that can help us learn. I look forward to your tutorials. Your comments re: PTE5 have been excellent and helpful.

Bill

[Ken Cox]

Lin

see

http://iconico.com/magnifier/

and there are a couple other things at the site

ken

[Lin Evans]

Lin

see

http://iconico.com/magnifier/

and there are a couple other things at the site

ken

Hey Ken,

I'm checking it out - thanks! I've already purchased the mouse but this sounds like a great alternative solution for those of us who need a bit of help - LOL

Lin

[Ken Cox]

you can even do a screen capture with the magnifier

also

i got the web page zoom item -- it gives a bit more flexibilty than the browser font increase button -- the whole web page increase's/decrease's

and the

Web Accessories for Internet Explorer 5

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/pr...cess/ie5wa.mspx

will work on IE6 and give you the r mouse zoom for picts on a webpage, as well as some other things

ken

[Lin Evans]

you can even do a screen capture with the magnifier

also

i got the web page zoom item -- it gives a bit more flexibilty than the browser font increase button -- the whole web page increase's/decrease's

and the

Web Accessories for Internet Explorer 5

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/pr...cess/ie5wa.mspx

will work on IE6 and give you the r mouse zoom for picts on a webpage, as well as some other things

ken

Great stuff! I'm on it!

Lin

[toolman]

Lin - where is the on line tutorial. Thanks

[Ken Cox]

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4431

http://www.lin-evans.net/beta5/index.html

KEN

[The oldie]

Ken and Lin,

Firstly thanks Ken for the link to the free Magnifier prog. Works a treat !

Lin, following our e-mails on the problem of unreadable detail in the screenshots in your tutorial I thought I would report that even using Ken's Magnifier over the screen shots the details is still unreadable and distorted.

I know you are looking at different solutions.

Regards to all you good people helping the aged and dimmer members of the forum (And I don't just mean eyesight !)

Alan in UK

[Barry Beckham]

Lin

Forgive me if I am missing something here, but if the screen shots I have just seen from your tutorial is what you are talking about, then I agree they are too small.

However, I don't really understand why. I do screen prints and paste them into a new document in Photoshop and then crop the bit I want. The result is a crystal clear screen grab as if you were looking at the original program.

There are also a couple of screen grab programs and hypersnaps is one that allows you to grab the screen, a portion as in a crop or a window/palette.

Here is an old tut I put up on my site a while back and the screen grabs are easily readable

http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/digitalav/dvd/dvd.htm

Barry

[Lin Evans]

Lin

Forgive me if I am missing something here, but if the screen shots I have just seen from your tutorial is what you are talking about, then I agree they are too small.

However, I don't really understand why. I do screen prints and paste them into a new document in Photoshop and then crop the bit I want. The result is a crystal clear screen grab as if you were looking at the original program.

There are also a couple of screen grab programs and hypersnaps is one that allows you to grab the screen, a portion as in a crop or a window/palette.

Here is an old tut I put up on my site a while back and the screen grabs are easily readable

http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/digitalav/dvd/dvd.htm

Barry

Hi Barry,

It actually wasn't a problem with the original screen capture, the resolution and readability was fine (I have lots of different screen capture tools) but rather the resizing of the entire captured image to fit the available space in MicroSoft Publisher which caused the distortion and relatively tiny print.

Originally, I wanted to preserve the entire page for perspective so that new users could see an overall image as they would on their own computer at that part of the program. In retrospect I realize that cropping only the relevant parts would have worked much better and the readability would have been excellent. I'm in the process of revising and modifying the tutorial as new features and information has become available. The original was done in about 30 miutes and only a couple days after the beta was released so there is plenty of room for improvement.

UPDATE - I just converted it to a PDF and I believe the problem is solved - the original is quite clean under PDF magnification:

Link below:

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/tutorial.pdf

Best regards,

Lin

Lin - where is the on line tutorial. Thanks

There are a couple - Jeff Evans and I have each been working independently on slightly different approaches. The two links are below:

UPDATE - Actually Three Links - I've just updated my html to a PDF document which is MUCH easier to read:

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/tutorial.pdf

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/jvedette/PTEV5guide.pdf

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/index.html

Best regards,

Lin

[ronwil]

Irrespective of what has been said it was Lin's early release of his tutorial and help from another source which gave me the key to unlocking the rudiments of PTE 5.0.

Ron [uK]