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HelpSetMaker Tutorials
Dirk Hillbrecht17th February 2004
Contents
1 Tutorial: How to create screenshots 3
1.1 What to show? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31.2 Take the shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31.3 Manipulate the screenshot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41.3.1 The fade effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61.3.2 Emphasing the dialog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151.4 Integrating the screenshot into the documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2 History 20
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HelpSetMaker Tutorials
How to produce a good documentation
HelpSetMaker is a great tool for producing online and printed docu-mentation. However, you have to know what you want to say and how to say it. If you are unfamilar with the task of documentation, this might be not as easy as it sounds.The tutorials in this document want to help you in this task of creating documentation. We’ll present differenttechniquesonhowtodocumentthingsandhowtoworkwithcertaintools. We’llworkwithseveralhelperprogramsduring the trails, but those will be Open Source Software and available on all relevant platforms. Therefore,regardless of the used platform, you should be able to perform everything described in this document.
Note
These tutorials are designed in a way that you get knowledge of reasonable number of tools. If you follow atrail, you will perhaps find that certain targets could be reached in a simpler or better way. Feel free to experimentwith that. Sometimes, the more complicated way has simply been chosen because the author did not know betterhimself when he wrote the explanations. In other cases, the more complex operation brings certain advantagescompared to a simpler approach. Normally, such circumstances are mentioned, however.2
 
1 Tutorial: How to create screenshots
Often, HelpSetMaker will be used to create documentation for programs. It is important to describe actions andfeatures not only by text, but also by pictures. This tutorial shows you how nice screenshots can be created forinclusion into HelpSetMaker documents. We need
•
a screenshot program. In the examples, we’ll work with
KSnapshot 
, the KDE screenshot program. Of course, you can use any other program.
•
an image editor. This tutorial shows the needed steps using
GIMP
, a free image manipulation program.Gimp is available for free for Linux and Windows platforms.
1.1 What to show?
It might sound superfluous, but the first and perhaps most important question is: What do you want to show? Ascreenshot should limit itself to exactly that item which is important. If you want to show a task requiring severalsteps, consider taking several shots and arrange them as a sequence.In our tutorial, we want to create a screenshot showing the "
Settings...
" menu item. You can see the finalresult of what we produce below or in the section about project settings of the HelpSetMaker manual.Figure 1: The settings menu item screenshot
1.2 Take the shot
For taking the screenshot, start the screenshot program. Here we use
KSnapshot 
, but any other program will work until it saves the taken shot in a lossless file format, e.g.
PNG
. Almost surely you won’t find a program without thiscapability.Figure 2: KSnapshot dialog3
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