This is one that would help me a LOT (in fact, I can’t use Scrivener w/o it for a specific purpose).
I attend a fair # of webinars. Most of these have PowerPoint slides. What I like to do is shrink the webinar window down to approx 1/4 screen. When there is a slide I want to copy I do the Alt + PrtSc to capture an image of that window.
In word, I merely have to do Cntrl V to insert that image into the document, then I can type my notes below it.
Unfortunately Scrivener doesn’t allow this. The image ends up going in HUGE. Not only that, there’s no way to shrink it to fit. It would AWESOME if Scrivener could handle images like this the same way MS Wod does.
It would be so awesome to have a series or all of the webinars from a particular company in one place, easily accessed via the Binder on the side. As it is now, I have to create a separate Word doc for each and make sure I file them in the same area.
I really hope you’ll give this one a high priority.
When you Ctrl-PrtSc (snapshot application) or Shift-Ctrl-PrtScr (snapshot current window), windows take a snapshot of the window/app, however it does it at full resolution for most packages that display bitmap images. This isn’t Windows fault, it is the application that provides the snapshot. The reason that Windows doesn’t control how the snapshot is scaled is so that the application providing the snapshot can make smart decisions about how it handles the request.
Word (and other WP packages) have built in bitmap handlers that can automatically scale the image to fit the required size. If Scrivener doesn’t do this, then it is because it just accepts the image and displays it verbatim. Good luck with the feature request, it seems like a good one to me.
I have the same issue really. I love Scrivener, but don’t do too much of my article/blog/how to guides writing with it as they use a fair amount of images. It tends to just be easier to enter directly into wordpress or use MS Word to enter in and quickly resize the screenshots.
I am ok with them being too large when pasted in, but it would be a really nice feature to do the drag n drop resizing.
The basic problem here is that resizing an image in Scrivener instructs the output format to apply that size to the format. The bitmap isn’t interpolated, to be clear, but any software displaying it that subscribes to the standards used will shrink it to the size you specify in the editor. A simple example of that on the Web is that the image will be provided verbatim (20mb for example, for a high-res print image), but will instruct the browser to display it at a size more suitable for screen. In short, you really want to scale the images as they should be before putting them into the editor, and then leave it alone. For web images this shouldn’t be a problem, you really should use graphic editing software to interpolate an image anyway because its algorithms for doing so will undoubtedly be superior. For print images it’s probably best to use placeholders and insert the print quality stuff later on, mainly because print res images tend to be quite large and there is little reason to bloat your project with them.
You should be able to set the display size in the editor though, all of that aside. If you right click on the image there will be an option for editing it and you can change its dimensions there. Again, this is kind of a “sloppy” way of doing things, but if you do not have Photoshop or some other tool for resizing images with a measure of quality, it’s a useful thing to have around. Just be aware it doesn’t actually shrink the image, it just sets the display size.
That should explain why things are not automatically size to fit anything, especially since the editor size itself is completely abstract from the output format itself.
Perhaps the original poster was referencing final production work. In my case I do the quick and dirty drop an image into the article where it goes, quick resize so I can see the image (In this case I am referring to PC Hardware review writing), finish the article, upload to the website, and place fully edited images where the placeholder paste went.
In that case I was referring, to like you said I believe, simply doing a “display size” drag and drop. Not pretty but keeps the writing moving forward as image polishing can be done once complete.
Yeah, and we might consider a compile flag that disables resizing in the future specifically for this type of workflow where the image in the editor really isn’t meant to be the final production image and all you really want of it is to have it there for the feel or reference. In that case you don’t want a massive graphic hogging the window, nor do you want the output to stipulate a size that was fine for whatever width your editor was set to in Scrivener, but not at all having anything to do with the Web/printed book/whatever.
If a flag like that were made available, then auto-resize to fit the editor when dropped in would make more sense.