Work with images in Oxygen

Tips and tricks

Images in Inspire

After you store images in Inspire in a binary format, you can insert them into your content. Inspire stores images as binary which means you can't edit the image in Inspire or Oxygen.

• When working with images in the Oxygen-based editor, you can:
  • Insert a reference to an image
  • Move the image inside the component
  • Format image attributes like height, width, and scaling. Follow the steps in Format an image.
    • To learn about other elements, read the Work with elements topic.

• In a DITA topic, the path of the image file in Inspire is inserted as the value of the @href attribute in an <image> element. For example:

  <image href="../images/image_file.png"/>

Use a supported image format. If you reference an unsupported image type, you may see a warning. Oxygen supports the following formats:

• EPS (The Encapsulated Post Script graphic only displays in Oxygen when the graphic was created with a preview in the source application. For example, Adobe Illustrator.)
• BMP
• GIF (animations not supported yet)
• JPG, JPEG
• PNG
• SVG, WMF
• TIFF

Know how big your image is. You may see a warning if you reference an image that's larger than 6 megapixels.

Know your options. There are several ways to work with images in a DITA topic, depending on what you want to do:

• There are a few different ways you can get an external image into a topic.

  • Import it into Inspire. Follow the steps in Import an image.
  • Insert an image from an Inspire folder. Follow the steps in Insert an Inspire image.
  • Specify the address where it's located using a URL. Use this method if you don't want to import it into Inspire. Follow the steps in Insert an external image.
    • You must use a valid URL that has 2000 characters or less. Otherwise, you will see an error message.
  • Copy an image from your desktop and paste it directly into an Oxygen topic. This imports the file for you into the same folder where the component is stored. Follow the steps in Copy and paste an external image.
  • Use drag-and-drop to add and import. Follow the steps in Drag and drop an image into a document.
• To move an image to a new place in the document, drag it and drop it into a new location using either the Outline pane or the Editing pane.
• To create a title and caption, control the alignment, or size and scale of an image, use attributes to format the image.

Work with PDF files as you would an image

After importing a PDF file into Inspire, you can reference it the same as you would an image. It's a binary file so you can't edit it, but you can add it to a topic using Oxygen and manage it in the Components browser. For more details, read Work with PDFs.