I am building a document solely from images and their captions. To save space on each page I am trying to resize images so that multiple images will fit in a row. To do this I double-click on an image and try to change the horizontal and verticle sizes.
I have two questions/issues:
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When I double click on an image the 1st time, the image shrinks to a postage stamp size and the horizontal and vertical values shown reflect this size. So I cancel and double-click on the image again. This time I am given the correct horizontal and vertical values that I can work with. This is just a little time-consuming and I would like the Edit Image dialogue box to open with the correct values the 1st time. Can you help?
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When the Edit Image dialogue box is open, I can change the horizontal value and the vertical value will change to reflect the Locked Aspect Ratio, but I cannot edit the vertical value and have it reflected in the horizontal value. Editing the vertical value is more important to me. Am I doing something that stops me from editing the vertical value?
Thanks in advance for your time on this.
I’d say there are a few different complexities you are running into with this process, here are some ideas:
- Firstly and most importantly, I would not suggest using the text editor to “resize” the images, because you aren’t really doing that. You’re just changing how big they look, and thus very likely packing too many pixels into that space, which can lead to a bloated project. If you’re thinking you want to store the original quality, a text file is not a very good place to store images in general, for multiple reasons (one corrupted image makes the whole thing extremely difficult to ever open again, the way images are stored in text files is very inefficient, auto-save must rewrite all of the images every time, causing lag, etc.). If you need them there because they are part of a document and must print in the text where you put them, well all right—that’s what the feature is there for—but if what you are really aiming for can be best described as an annotated grid of images…
- …have you considered using the corkboard for this? You just drop 50 images into a folder in the binder, all at once, and you’re done! Want to change the size? Click the little 4-card icon in the lower-right footer bar and drag the slider. Want to add captions? Double-click the filename text at the top and type. And there are even better reasons to use the corkboard over a text editor. Click the “freeform” button a bit to the left of the corkboard options button, and now you have a “light-board”.
- So with the alternatives out of the way, what you are most likely running into, for both of your questions in fact, is that the image is so large that it is too big for the editor. The symptoms of this are that it doesn’t appear to resize visually at first, or acts a bit oddly when doing so, because Scrivener isn’t a desktop publishing program and prioritises utility over literal design. What that means practically is that the image is being scaled down dynamically so that you can see it, and that of course in turn means that for a good while with this slider you’re changing the display size “off screen”.
Now again that’s a problem of having way too many pixels, and it really should be solved in a graphics editing program before it gets dropped into the editor—ideally to the size you actually want it to be, but at the least, seeing as how the default editor width in Scrivener is a bit larger than the size of a block of text on a typical A4 or Letter printed page, there is rarely any reason to have an image wider than that in the editor.
So the two best choices and their pros and cons:
- Corkboard: very easy to use and efficient. Images are stored in their native format and you can easily “zoom in” to see the full image without messing with resize controls, simply by loading it off the corkboard. The downside of course is that this is just a view, if you do need to print all of these into a book then it isn’t the right tool.
- Correctly sized images in the editor: it’s more work up front, without a doubt, but the result will mean you text documents are precisely no larger than they need to be, and you generally don’t have to mess with the sliders or ever change an image in the editor. This can mean higher quality output, and maintaining a consistent DPI per image (rather than whatever arbitrary number you get by changing the display size).