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Printing in High Resolution

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Printing in High Resolution

If you select "File, Print" from RasMol's menus, the image will be printed at screen resolution. This will appear jagged and of poor quality since most inkjet or laserjet printers print at least 300 dots/inch (120 per cm), while even at 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high, a 15-inch (38-cm) screen has less than 100 dpi (40 dpc). Below are outlined several alternative strategies for printing high-resolution images.

One solution is to use the highest screen resolution available to you (perhaps 1280 x 1024), and resize RasMol's graphics window to full-screen. Particularly if you print the result at less than screen-size (e.g. in portrait rather than landscape mode and/or xerographically reduce the image), it may have acceptable resolution. A similar result will be achieved if you select "Export, GIF" from RasMol's menus and save an image file (same resolution as screen). Such a GIF file can be used on a web page or printed with a shareware graphics editor such as LviewPro for Windows (what is good for Macs?). LviewPro is also good for combining several RasMol images, annotating them with good-looking text, cropping, changing the background color or making the background transparent (save as GIF89a), etc.

If you have a postscript printer, the RasMol command write vectps filename creates a postscript file at printer resolution, which can then be sent to your printer. (This command is not on RasMol's Export menu nor is it documented in the on-line help. The command write ps filename writes raster postscript at screen resolution.) The disadvantage of vector postscript is that at present it does not support ribbons, cartoons, strands, or traces. Note that the set vectps on command adds outlines to cylinder bonds or spheres. However, it presently does not work for spheres intersecting more than one other sphere. Thus, it works well for stick or ball-and-stick images but not for most spacefilling images.

A final solution is to recompile RasMol's source code after inserting modifications which facilitate making higher-resolution images. Details can be found by searching for "resolution" in the RasMol email discussion history for January, March and July 1996.

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