Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Helge Hafting]

Rich Shepard wrote:


On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


It probably took the 100dpi from your X setup.



  Actually, when I looked more closely, the X and Y resolution of the 
image

was 1 dpi, with a scaling factor of 100. It was invisible in the pdflatex
output. When I scaled the resolution to 200 dpi in the GIMP and left the
image size (in pixels) alone, it displayed nicely.


Just forget about dpi.  It is such an awkward way to size a raster image.
The image resolution is a certain number of pixels - plain and simple.
And in lyx you can set the image to be a certain size - in inches, 
centimeters

or percent of the line width.  The latter do the right thing in all cases,
i.e. an 100% line-width image will fit in any list, minipage or other
construct where the line width is different.  Also, images scaled
to a percentage of the line width will work even when you
change the margins or paper size.

Many graphics programs mistakenly think that image dpi is something
worth caring about - I newer saw any use for that.  If I size an
image, then it is because I want it to have a certain _size_, not a certain
printing resolution.  The latter just make it hard to guess what the print
size will be.  What will the size of a 653-pixel 72dpi picture be?  And
no, I am not interested in the 9.064 inches that works out to, but
will it fit in this minipage? (Which is not measured in inches .  .  .)

Always use the full resolution of a screen dump.  Screendumps usually
prints with visible pixels, and scaling them in gimp will always make that
much worse.  Using the full resolution gives the best possible result,
the only possible downside being a largish pdf.
Think of the raster image as printed on a rubber sheet, lyx can stretch or
compress it to whatever output size you desire.  If the image is too big in
lyx, use the separate scaling factor for showing in lyx. 


Helge Hafting

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Enrico Forestieri]

Helge Hafting [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Always use the full resolution of a screen dump.  Screendumps usually
 prints with visible pixels, and scaling them in gimp will always make that
 much worse.  Using the full resolution gives the best possible result,
 the only possible downside being a largish pdf.

Here is a way to capture a window at full screen resolution:

$ xwd -frame  foo.xwd
$ convert foo.xwd foo.png

--
Enrico

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Helge Hafting]

Rich Shepard wrote:


On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


It probably took the 100dpi from your X setup.



  Actually, when I looked more closely, the X and Y resolution of the 
image

was 1 dpi, with a scaling factor of 100. It was invisible in the pdflatex
output. When I scaled the resolution to 200 dpi in the GIMP and left the
image size (in pixels) alone, it displayed nicely.


Just forget about dpi.  It is such an awkward way to size a raster image.
The image resolution is a certain number of pixels - plain and simple.
And in lyx you can set the image to be a certain size - in inches, 
centimeters

or percent of the line width.  The latter do the right thing in all cases,
i.e. an 100% line-width image will fit in any list, minipage or other
construct where the line width is different.  Also, images scaled
to a percentage of the line width will work even when you
change the margins or paper size.

Many graphics programs mistakenly think that image dpi is something
worth caring about - I newer saw any use for that.  If I size an
image, then it is because I want it to have a certain _size_, not a certain
printing resolution.  The latter just make it hard to guess what the print
size will be.  What will the size of a 653-pixel 72dpi picture be?  And
no, I am not interested in the 9.064 inches that works out to, but
will it fit in this minipage? (Which is not measured in inches .  .  .)

Always use the full resolution of a screen dump.  Screendumps usually
prints with visible pixels, and scaling them in gimp will always make that
much worse.  Using the full resolution gives the best possible result,
the only possible downside being a largish pdf.
Think of the raster image as printed on a rubber sheet, lyx can stretch or
compress it to whatever output size you desire.  If the image is too big in
lyx, use the separate scaling factor for showing in lyx. 


Helge Hafting

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Enrico Forestieri]

Helge Hafting [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Always use the full resolution of a screen dump.  Screendumps usually
 prints with visible pixels, and scaling them in gimp will always make that
 much worse.  Using the full resolution gives the best possible result,
 the only possible downside being a largish pdf.

Here is a way to capture a window at full screen resolution:

$ xwd -frame  foo.xwd
$ convert foo.xwd foo.png

--
Enrico

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Helge Hafting]

Rich Shepard wrote:


On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


It probably took the 100dpi from your X setup.



  Actually, when I looked more closely, the X and Y resolution of the 
image

was 1 dpi, with a scaling factor of 100. It was invisible in the pdflatex
output. When I scaled the resolution to 200 dpi in the GIMP and left the
image size (in pixels) alone, it displayed nicely.


Just forget about "dpi".  It is such an awkward way to size a raster image.
The image resolution is a certain number of pixels - plain and simple.
And in lyx you can set the image to be a certain size - in inches, 
centimeters

or percent of the line width.  The latter do the right thing in all cases,
i.e. an 100% line-width image will fit in any list, minipage or other
construct where the line width is different.  Also, images scaled
to a percentage of the line width will work even when you
change the margins or paper size.

Many graphics programs mistakenly think that image "dpi" is something
worth caring about - I newer saw any use for that.  If I size an
image, then it is because I want it to have a certain _size_, not a certain
printing resolution.  The latter just make it hard to guess what the print
size will be.  What will the size of a 653-pixel 72dpi picture be?  And
no, I am not interested in the 9.064 inches that works out to, but
will it fit in this minipage? (Which is not measured in inches .  .  .)

Always use the full resolution of a screen dump.  Screendumps usually
prints with visible pixels, and scaling them in gimp will always make that
much worse.  Using the full resolution gives the best possible result,
the only possible downside being a largish pdf.
Think of the raster image as printed on a rubber sheet, lyx can stretch or
compress it to whatever output size you desire.  If the image is too big in
lyx, use the separate scaling factor for "showing in lyx". 


Helge Hafting

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Enrico Forestieri]

Helge Hafting <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Always use the full resolution of a screen dump.  Screendumps usually
> prints with visible pixels, and scaling them in gimp will always make that
> much worse.  Using the full resolution gives the best possible result,
> the only possible downside being a largish pdf.

Here is a way to capture a window at full screen resolution:

$ xwd -frame > foo.xwd
$ convert foo.xwd foo.png

--
Enrico

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 17:58 schrieb Rich Shepard:
A document requires screen shots as illustrations. I've used The GIMP 
to
 capture the window, scaled the result to 100 pixels/inch resolution, and 
a
 size of 4 inches wide. Then it's saved as a .png file. The document will
 almost certainly be printed by readers on a laser or color inkjet 
printer.

I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch 
don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is 
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final 
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100%  text 
width or some other document related size.
When I do screenshots, I simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes 
I crop unnessecary borders away, but more manipulations are normally not 
needed.

I'm seeking comments on whether there is a better way to represent 
these
 images. That is, should the resolution be higher? Is a different file 
format
 a better choice?

PNG is a good file format for this task: it is a bitmap format, and has 
lossless compression that works well for typical screen contents. It will 
be included without conversion in the resulting pdf with pdflatex, and it 
can be easily converted to eps by LyX if you use latex with postscript 
output. JPEG would  also be an alternative, but only if you have file 
size probelms, since it compresses lossy. There are a lot of commercial 
software manuals with JPEG screenshots, but that looks ugly.

 They are raster images to begin with, so conversion to a 
 vector format such as .eps will almost certainly result in resolution 
loss.

I don't think so. EPS can contain vector and bitmap data, with a good 
converter the result will be equivalent to the original image (but 
typically require more storage on disk).


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch don't
matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100% text
width or some other document related size. When I do screenshots, I simply
save the resulting file as png. Sometimes I crop unnessecary borders away,
but more manipulations are normally not needed.


  Thanks, Georg. I considered doing that but the large size of the images in
the LyX document prompted me to shrink them before hand.

  What resolution do you use when you save the image?

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |   Author of Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch
don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100%  text
width or some other document related size.
When I do screenshots, I simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes
I crop unnessecary borders away, but more manipulations are normally not
needed.


Georg,

  This is really strange. When I look at the screenshot attributes in The
GIMP, I see that it's 100 dpi resolution and 800-something pixels wide. The
image imports into the document and displays in the LyX float window. But,
now when I try to look at it using pdflatex, there is either no image at all
above the caption, or a black band.

  Within LyX I've tried scaling the image to 100% of the line and of the text
area. I've also tried 50% scale and 4 inches.

  I wonder why this is not working now, when the GIMP-scaled images displayed
just fine before, and your technique works well for you.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |   Author of Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:23 schrieb Rich Shepard:
 On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:
  I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch
  don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
  predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
  scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100% text
  width or some other document related size. When I do screenshots, I
  simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes I crop unnessecary
  borders away, but more manipulations are normally not needed.

how do you crop them away?
(e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do you use 
a program? And which one?

Wolfgang

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:23 schrieb Rich Shepard:
Thanks, Georg. I considered doing that but the large size of the 
images in
 the LyX document prompted me to shrink them before hand.

You can adjust the onscreen display to 30% or something like that in the 
graphics dialog. Or did you mean file size? A screenshot of my 1280x1024 
desktop is typically about 160 kb, you can store lots of these images on 
todays storage media.

What resolution do you use when you save the image?

I don't set any, I simply save the image as png. The resolution that is 
saved in the png file does only matter if you use the size% units for 
scaling in LyX, but for my stuff I don't use this very often.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:37 schrieb Rich Shepard:
This is really strange. When I look at the screenshot attributes in 
The
 GIMP, I see that it's 100 dpi resolution and 800-something pixels wide.

It probably took the 100dpi from your X setup.

 The 
 image imports into the document and displays in the LyX float window. 
But,
 now when I try to look at it using pdflatex, there is either no image at 
all
 above the caption, or a black band.
 
Within LyX I've tried scaling the image to 100% of the line and of 
the text
 area. I've also tried 50% scale and 4 inches.
 
I wonder why this is not working now, when the GIMP-scaled images 
displayed
 just fine before, and your technique works well for you.

Sorry, but I don't know what could be the problem. Running pdflatex by 
hand in the temp directory might give more insight.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:41 schrieb Wolfgang Engelmann:
 how do you crop them away?
 (e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do 
you use 
 a program? And which one?

When I need to crop white borders of eps files, I usually run them through 
pstoepsi, or use the crop options in the LyX graphics dialog.
What I meant here where screenshots, where I use the automatic cropping 
feature of the gimp to do that.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Herbert Voss]

Georg Baum wrote:

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:41 schrieb Wolfgang Engelmann:


how do you crop them away?
(e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do 


you use 


a program? And which one?



When I need to crop white borders of eps files, I usually run them through 
pstoepsi, or use the crop options in the LyX graphics dialog.
What I meant here where screenshots, where I use the automatic cropping 
feature of the gimp to do that.


pdfcrop --margins 10 file.pdf

can be done with a script ...

Herbert

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Sara Stymne]

Hi!

I have no solution, but a related problem...

In LyX I canot use insert-graphics from the menu. I think this is 
because LyX uses the graphics package and that it somehow conflicts with 
the gb4e package that I also use. When I remove gb4e graphic-insertion 
seems to work, but not the gb4e-stuff of course. I found a workaround to 
this, using graphicxs and include pictures with ERT. It works, but LyX 
does not seem to be capable to convert png to eps, when not using 
pdflatex, which I believe it does when inserting throw the menu.  And I 
prefer not to use pdflatex, because it seems to make the quality of my 
xypic-figures quite bad.


So then I have to manually convert png to eps for my screenshot. I tried 
to convert both with the Gimp and with the imagemagick convert tool, but 
both ways the quality of the eps-images are quite bad.


So, any ideas? Either how to produce nice xypic with pdflatex, or nice 
eps screenshots from png..


/Sara




Rich Shepard wrote:

  A document requires screen shots as illustrations. I've used The 
GIMP to
capture the window, scaled the result to 100 pixels/inch resolution, 
and a

size of 4 inches wide. Then it's saved as a .png file. The document will
almost certainly be printed by readers on a laser or color inkjet 
printer.


  I'm seeking comments on whether there is a better way to represent 
these
images. That is, should the resolution be higher? Is a different file 
format

a better choice? They are raster images to begin with, so conversion to a
vector format such as .eps will almost certainly result in resolution 
loss.


  Your experience counts! What have you to suggest?

Rich

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Sara Stymne]

Stephen Harris wrote:



- Original Message - From: Sara Stymne [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: lyx-users@lists.lyx.org
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2006 1:50 PM
Subject: Re: Screen Captures in Documents



Hi!

I have no solution, but a related problem...

In LyX I canot use insert-graphics from the menu. I think this is 
because LyX uses the graphics package and that it somehow conflicts 
with the gb4e package that I also use. When I remove gb4e 
graphic-insertion seems to work, but not the gb4e-stuff of course. I 
found a workaround to this, using graphicxs and include pictures with 
ERT. It works, but LyX does not seem to be capable to convert png to 
eps, when not using pdflatex, which I believe it does when inserting 
throw the menu.  And I prefer not to use pdflatex, because it seems 
to make the quality of my xypic-figures quite bad.


So then I have to manually convert png to eps for my screenshot. I 
tried to convert both with the Gimp and with the imagemagick convert 
tool, but both ways the quality of the eps-images are quite bad.


So, any ideas? Either how to produce nice xypic with pdflatex, or 
nice eps screenshots from png..


/Sara



Perhaps you are experienced with xypic, but if not, here is a 10 page
tutorial: http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~gumm/LyX/xypic/xypic.pdf

When I converted xypic.lyx with pdflatex I got the same image as above^.
This looks clear to me, but perhaps I don't have high standards. :-)
I attach xypic.lyx for comparison purposes, and a perhaps relevant 
portion:


\begin_inset Graphics
filename xyfigure.PNG
scale 62
clip

\end_inset

SH: I also converted xypic.tex to html with htlatex which generates 
png images

http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/%7Egumm/LyX/Using_XYpic_in_LyX.htm

I think the pngs look ok but parts of the conversion require editing.
The LyX developers removed support for XYpic from LyX1.4.0
I was thinking Prof. Gumm might be more attuned to this problem area.

Regards,
Stephen 



I wasn't actually using xypic, but xyling which is a linguistic tree 
package built on xypic, and thus I could not use it in LyX directly, so 
I constructed the pictures in ERT. Should probably have mentioned that 
in the first mail, but I didn't think about it...


The pictures looks mostly fine, but the diagonal lines are not straight, 
neither when viewed with a pdf-viewer, or printed. They are actually not 
straight when not using pdflatex either, but they are much better.


On another topic, I think that LyX is great, and I started using it so 
that I would not have to learn too much latex, which I did not know at 
that stage. But in the end I found it easier to do it the latex way than 
the LyX way in very many cases.


/Sara

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 17:58 schrieb Rich Shepard:
A document requires screen shots as illustrations. I've used The GIMP 
to
 capture the window, scaled the result to 100 pixels/inch resolution, and 
a
 size of 4 inches wide. Then it's saved as a .png file. The document will
 almost certainly be printed by readers on a laser or color inkjet 
printer.

I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch 
don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is 
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final 
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100%  text 
width or some other document related size.
When I do screenshots, I simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes 
I crop unnessecary borders away, but more manipulations are normally not 
needed.

I'm seeking comments on whether there is a better way to represent 
these
 images. That is, should the resolution be higher? Is a different file 
format
 a better choice?

PNG is a good file format for this task: it is a bitmap format, and has 
lossless compression that works well for typical screen contents. It will 
be included without conversion in the resulting pdf with pdflatex, and it 
can be easily converted to eps by LyX if you use latex with postscript 
output. JPEG would  also be an alternative, but only if you have file 
size probelms, since it compresses lossy. There are a lot of commercial 
software manuals with JPEG screenshots, but that looks ugly.

 They are raster images to begin with, so conversion to a 
 vector format such as .eps will almost certainly result in resolution 
loss.

I don't think so. EPS can contain vector and bitmap data, with a good 
converter the result will be equivalent to the original image (but 
typically require more storage on disk).


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch don't
matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100% text
width or some other document related size. When I do screenshots, I simply
save the resulting file as png. Sometimes I crop unnessecary borders away,
but more manipulations are normally not needed.


  Thanks, Georg. I considered doing that but the large size of the images in
the LyX document prompted me to shrink them before hand.

  What resolution do you use when you save the image?

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |   Author of Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch
don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100%  text
width or some other document related size.
When I do screenshots, I simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes
I crop unnessecary borders away, but more manipulations are normally not
needed.


Georg,

  This is really strange. When I look at the screenshot attributes in The
GIMP, I see that it's 100 dpi resolution and 800-something pixels wide. The
image imports into the document and displays in the LyX float window. But,
now when I try to look at it using pdflatex, there is either no image at all
above the caption, or a black band.

  Within LyX I've tried scaling the image to 100% of the line and of the text
area. I've also tried 50% scale and 4 inches.

  I wonder why this is not working now, when the GIMP-scaled images displayed
just fine before, and your technique works well for you.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |   Author of Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:23 schrieb Rich Shepard:
 On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:
  I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch
  don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
  predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
  scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100% text
  width or some other document related size. When I do screenshots, I
  simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes I crop unnessecary
  borders away, but more manipulations are normally not needed.

how do you crop them away?
(e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do you use 
a program? And which one?

Wolfgang

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:23 schrieb Rich Shepard:
Thanks, Georg. I considered doing that but the large size of the 
images in
 the LyX document prompted me to shrink them before hand.

You can adjust the onscreen display to 30% or something like that in the 
graphics dialog. Or did you mean file size? A screenshot of my 1280x1024 
desktop is typically about 160 kb, you can store lots of these images on 
todays storage media.

What resolution do you use when you save the image?

I don't set any, I simply save the image as png. The resolution that is 
saved in the png file does only matter if you use the size% units for 
scaling in LyX, but for my stuff I don't use this very often.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:37 schrieb Rich Shepard:
This is really strange. When I look at the screenshot attributes in 
The
 GIMP, I see that it's 100 dpi resolution and 800-something pixels wide.

It probably took the 100dpi from your X setup.

 The 
 image imports into the document and displays in the LyX float window. 
But,
 now when I try to look at it using pdflatex, there is either no image at 
all
 above the caption, or a black band.
 
Within LyX I've tried scaling the image to 100% of the line and of 
the text
 area. I've also tried 50% scale and 4 inches.
 
I wonder why this is not working now, when the GIMP-scaled images 
displayed
 just fine before, and your technique works well for you.

Sorry, but I don't know what could be the problem. Running pdflatex by 
hand in the temp directory might give more insight.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:41 schrieb Wolfgang Engelmann:
 how do you crop them away?
 (e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do 
you use 
 a program? And which one?

When I need to crop white borders of eps files, I usually run them through 
pstoepsi, or use the crop options in the LyX graphics dialog.
What I meant here where screenshots, where I use the automatic cropping 
feature of the gimp to do that.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Herbert Voss]

Georg Baum wrote:

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:41 schrieb Wolfgang Engelmann:


how do you crop them away?
(e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do 


you use 


a program? And which one?



When I need to crop white borders of eps files, I usually run them through 
pstoepsi, or use the crop options in the LyX graphics dialog.
What I meant here where screenshots, where I use the automatic cropping 
feature of the gimp to do that.


pdfcrop --margins 10 file.pdf

can be done with a script ...

Herbert

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Sara Stymne]

Hi!

I have no solution, but a related problem...

In LyX I canot use insert-graphics from the menu. I think this is 
because LyX uses the graphics package and that it somehow conflicts with 
the gb4e package that I also use. When I remove gb4e graphic-insertion 
seems to work, but not the gb4e-stuff of course. I found a workaround to 
this, using graphicxs and include pictures with ERT. It works, but LyX 
does not seem to be capable to convert png to eps, when not using 
pdflatex, which I believe it does when inserting throw the menu.  And I 
prefer not to use pdflatex, because it seems to make the quality of my 
xypic-figures quite bad.


So then I have to manually convert png to eps for my screenshot. I tried 
to convert both with the Gimp and with the imagemagick convert tool, but 
both ways the quality of the eps-images are quite bad.


So, any ideas? Either how to produce nice xypic with pdflatex, or nice 
eps screenshots from png..


/Sara




Rich Shepard wrote:

  A document requires screen shots as illustrations. I've used The 
GIMP to
capture the window, scaled the result to 100 pixels/inch resolution, 
and a

size of 4 inches wide. Then it's saved as a .png file. The document will
almost certainly be printed by readers on a laser or color inkjet 
printer.


  I'm seeking comments on whether there is a better way to represent 
these
images. That is, should the resolution be higher? Is a different file 
format

a better choice? They are raster images to begin with, so conversion to a
vector format such as .eps will almost certainly result in resolution 
loss.


  Your experience counts! What have you to suggest?

Rich

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Sara Stymne]

Stephen Harris wrote:



- Original Message - From: Sara Stymne [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: lyx-users@lists.lyx.org
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2006 1:50 PM
Subject: Re: Screen Captures in Documents



Hi!

I have no solution, but a related problem...

In LyX I canot use insert-graphics from the menu. I think this is 
because LyX uses the graphics package and that it somehow conflicts 
with the gb4e package that I also use. When I remove gb4e 
graphic-insertion seems to work, but not the gb4e-stuff of course. I 
found a workaround to this, using graphicxs and include pictures with 
ERT. It works, but LyX does not seem to be capable to convert png to 
eps, when not using pdflatex, which I believe it does when inserting 
throw the menu.  And I prefer not to use pdflatex, because it seems 
to make the quality of my xypic-figures quite bad.


So then I have to manually convert png to eps for my screenshot. I 
tried to convert both with the Gimp and with the imagemagick convert 
tool, but both ways the quality of the eps-images are quite bad.


So, any ideas? Either how to produce nice xypic with pdflatex, or 
nice eps screenshots from png..


/Sara



Perhaps you are experienced with xypic, but if not, here is a 10 page
tutorial: http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~gumm/LyX/xypic/xypic.pdf

When I converted xypic.lyx with pdflatex I got the same image as above^.
This looks clear to me, but perhaps I don't have high standards. :-)
I attach xypic.lyx for comparison purposes, and a perhaps relevant 
portion:


\begin_inset Graphics
filename xyfigure.PNG
scale 62
clip

\end_inset

SH: I also converted xypic.tex to html with htlatex which generates 
png images

http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/%7Egumm/LyX/Using_XYpic_in_LyX.htm

I think the pngs look ok but parts of the conversion require editing.
The LyX developers removed support for XYpic from LyX1.4.0
I was thinking Prof. Gumm might be more attuned to this problem area.

Regards,
Stephen 



I wasn't actually using xypic, but xyling which is a linguistic tree 
package built on xypic, and thus I could not use it in LyX directly, so 
I constructed the pictures in ERT. Should probably have mentioned that 
in the first mail, but I didn't think about it...


The pictures looks mostly fine, but the diagonal lines are not straight, 
neither when viewed with a pdf-viewer, or printed. They are actually not 
straight when not using pdflatex either, but they are much better.


On another topic, I think that LyX is great, and I started using it so 
that I would not have to learn too much latex, which I did not know at 
that stage. But in the end I found it easier to do it the latex way than 
the LyX way in very many cases.


/Sara

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 17:58 schrieb Rich Shepard:
>A document requires screen shots as illustrations. I've used The GIMP 
to
> capture the window, scaled the result to 100 pixels/inch resolution, and 
a
> size of 4 inches wide. Then it's saved as a .png file. The document will
> almost certainly be printed by readers on a laser or color inkjet 
printer.

I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch 
don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is 
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final 
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100%  text 
width or some other document related size.
When I do screenshots, I simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes 
I crop unnessecary borders away, but more manipulations are normally not 
needed.

>I'm seeking comments on whether there is a better way to represent 
these
> images. That is, should the resolution be higher? Is a different file 
format
> a better choice?

PNG is a good file format for this task: it is a bitmap format, and has 
lossless compression that works well for typical screen contents. It will 
be included without conversion in the resulting pdf with pdflatex, and it 
can be easily converted to eps by LyX if you use latex with postscript 
output. JPEG would  also be an alternative, but only if you have file 
size probelms, since it compresses lossy. There are a lot of commercial 
software manuals with JPEG screenshots, but that looks ugly.

> They are raster images to begin with, so conversion to a 
> vector format such as .eps will almost certainly result in resolution 
loss.

I don't think so. EPS can contain vector and bitmap data, with a good 
converter the result will be equivalent to the original image (but 
typically require more storage on disk).


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch don't
matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100% text
width or some other document related size. When I do screenshots, I simply
save the resulting file as png. Sometimes I crop unnessecary borders away,
but more manipulations are normally not needed.


  Thanks, Georg. I considered doing that but the large size of the images in
the LyX document prompted me to shrink them before hand.

  What resolution do you use when you save the image?

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
 Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:


I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch
don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100%  text
width or some other document related size.
When I do screenshots, I simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes
I crop unnessecary borders away, but more manipulations are normally not
needed.


Georg,

  This is really strange. When I look at the screenshot attributes in The
GIMP, I see that it's 100 dpi resolution and 800-something pixels wide. The
image imports into the document and displays in the LyX float window. But,
now when I try to look at it using pdflatex, there is either no image at all
above the caption, or a black band.

  Within LyX I've tried scaling the image to 100% of the line and of the text
area. I've also tried 50% scale and 4 inches.

  I wonder why this is not working now, when the GIMP-scaled images displayed
just fine before, and your technique works well for you.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
 Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:23 schrieb Rich Shepard:
> On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Georg Baum wrote:
> > I would not scale the image. The dimensions of the screenshot in inch
> > don't matter at all, what matters is the number of pixels, and that is
> > predetermined by the window you want to capture. You can do the final
> > scaling in LyX, this is often preferable, because you scale to 100% text
> > width or some other document related size. When I do screenshots, I
> > simply save the resulting file as png. Sometimes I crop unnessecary
> > borders away, but more manipulations are normally not needed.

how do you crop them away?
(e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do you use 
a program? And which one?

Wolfgang

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:23 schrieb Rich Shepard:
>Thanks, Georg. I considered doing that but the large size of the 
images in
> the LyX document prompted me to shrink them before hand.

You can adjust the onscreen display to 30% or something like that in the 
graphics dialog. Or did you mean file size? A screenshot of my 1280x1024 
desktop is typically about 160 kb, you can store lots of these images on 
todays storage media.

>What resolution do you use when you save the image?

I don't set any, I simply save the image as png. The resolution that is 
saved in the png file does only matter if you use the "size%" units for 
scaling in LyX, but for my stuff I don't use this very often.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:37 schrieb Rich Shepard:
>This is really strange. When I look at the screenshot attributes in 
The
> GIMP, I see that it's 100 dpi resolution and 800-something pixels wide.

It probably took the 100dpi from your X setup.

> The 
> image imports into the document and displays in the LyX float window. 
But,
> now when I try to look at it using pdflatex, there is either no image at 
all
> above the caption, or a black band.
> 
>Within LyX I've tried scaling the image to 100% of the line and of 
the text
> area. I've also tried 50% scale and 4 inches.
> 
>I wonder why this is not working now, when the GIMP-scaled images 
displayed
> just fine before, and your technique works well for you.

Sorry, but I don't know what could be the problem. Running pdflatex by 
hand in the temp directory might give more insight.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Georg Baum]

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:41 schrieb Wolfgang Engelmann:
> how do you crop them away?
> (e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do 
you use 
> a program? And which one?

When I need to crop white borders of eps files, I usually run them through 
pstoepsi, or use the crop options in the LyX graphics dialog.
What I meant here where screenshots, where I use the automatic cropping 
feature of the gimp to do that.


Georg

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Herbert Voss]

Georg Baum wrote:

Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 18:41 schrieb Wolfgang Engelmann:


how do you crop them away?
(e.g. eps-file). Do you do it in the eps description of the file or do 


you use 


a program? And which one?



When I need to crop white borders of eps files, I usually run them through 
pstoepsi, or use the crop options in the LyX graphics dialog.
What I meant here where screenshots, where I use the automatic cropping 
feature of the gimp to do that.


pdfcrop --margins "10" file.pdf

can be done with a script ...

Herbert

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Sara Stymne]

Hi!

I have no solution, but a related problem...

In LyX I canot use insert->graphics from the menu. I think this is 
because LyX uses the graphics package and that it somehow conflicts with 
the gb4e package that I also use. When I remove gb4e graphic-insertion 
seems to work, but not the gb4e-stuff of course. I found a workaround to 
this, using graphicxs and include pictures with ERT. It works, but LyX 
does not seem to be capable to convert png to eps, when not using 
pdflatex, which I believe it does when inserting throw the menu.  And I 
prefer not to use pdflatex, because it seems to make the quality of my 
xypic-figures quite bad.


So then I have to manually convert png to eps for my screenshot. I tried 
to convert both with the Gimp and with the imagemagick convert tool, but 
both ways the quality of the eps-images are quite bad.


So, any ideas? Either how to produce nice xypic with pdflatex, or nice 
eps screenshots from png..


/Sara




Rich Shepard wrote:

  A document requires screen shots as illustrations. I've used The 
GIMP to
capture the window, scaled the result to 100 pixels/inch resolution, 
and a

size of 4 inches wide. Then it's saved as a .png file. The document will
almost certainly be printed by readers on a laser or color inkjet 
printer.


  I'm seeking comments on whether there is a better way to represent 
these
images. That is, should the resolution be higher? Is a different file 
format

a better choice? They are raster images to begin with, so conversion to a
vector format such as .eps will almost certainly result in resolution 
loss.


  Your experience counts! What have you to suggest?

Rich

Re: Screen Captures in Documents

[Sara Stymne]

Stephen Harris wrote:



- Original Message - From: "Sara Stymne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <lyx-users@lists.lyx.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2006 1:50 PM
Subject: Re: Screen Captures in Documents



Hi!

I have no solution, but a related problem...

In LyX I canot use insert->graphics from the menu. I think this is 
because LyX uses the graphics package and that it somehow conflicts 
with the gb4e package that I also use. When I remove gb4e 
graphic-insertion seems to work, but not the gb4e-stuff of course. I 
found a workaround to this, using graphicxs and include pictures with 
ERT. It works, but LyX does not seem to be capable to convert png to 
eps, when not using pdflatex, which I believe it does when inserting 
throw the menu.  And I prefer not to use pdflatex, because it seems 
to make the quality of my xypic-figures quite bad.


So then I have to manually convert png to eps for my screenshot. I 
tried to convert both with the Gimp and with the imagemagick convert 
tool, but both ways the quality of the eps-images are quite bad.


So, any ideas? Either how to produce nice xypic with pdflatex, or 
nice eps screenshots from png..


/Sara



Perhaps you are experienced with xypic, but if not, here is a 10 page
tutorial: http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~gumm/LyX/xypic/xypic.pdf

When I converted xypic.lyx with pdflatex I got the same image as above^.
This looks clear to me, but perhaps I don't have high standards. :-)
I attach xypic.lyx for comparison purposes, and a perhaps relevant 
portion:


\begin_inset Graphics
filename xyfigure.PNG
scale 62
clip

\end_inset

SH: I also converted xypic.tex to html with htlatex which generates 
png images

http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/%7Egumm/LyX/Using_XYpic_in_LyX.htm

I think the pngs look ok but parts of the conversion require editing.
The LyX developers removed support for XYpic from LyX1.4.0
I was thinking Prof. Gumm might be more attuned to this problem area.

Regards,
Stephen 



I wasn't actually using xypic, but xyling which is a linguistic tree 
package built on xypic, and thus I could not use it in LyX directly, so 
I constructed the pictures in ERT. Should probably have mentioned that 
in the first mail, but I didn't think about it...


The pictures looks mostly fine, but the diagonal lines are not straight, 
neither when viewed with a pdf-viewer, or printed. They are actually not 
straight when not using pdflatex either, but they are much better.


On another topic, I think that LyX is great, and I started using it so 
that I would not have to learn too much latex, which I did not know at 
that stage. But in the end I found it easier to do it the latex way than 
the LyX way in very many cases.


/Sara