capturing screen images with XV

This is not a complete reference on how to use xv, just instructions on how to use it to capture portions of your screen, possibly for use in building web pages.

Start xv by either running it in a command window
xv &
or by selecting it from the workspace menu under programs, which you can get by pressing the right mouse button in the background of your screen.
Once xv gives you its initial window, bring up the xv control panel by clicking the right mouse button in the image window.
Press the grab button in the right corner of the xv control panel to bring up the grab dialog box.
Then, either move the xv windows out of the way, or check the Hide XV windows box.
Adjust your application so that the view you wish to capture is visible. For example, if you are using SDRC IDEAS, you may want to use dynamic view to rotate and scale the object to get the optimum view. Also, you can play with the lighting options for shaded views...etc. For best results, you may also want to temporarily change the background behind your drawing to white. (In IDEAS, select Background Color from the main Options menu at the top of the icon bar.)
Use either grab or autograb to select the screen image:
- To grab, press the grab button on the grab dialog box, then use the middle mouse button to drag out a to select the area of the screen you want to copy, or use the left button to grab an entire window's contents.
- To use autograb, set the delay to one or more seconds, then press the autograb button, move the mouse into the window you wish to copy, and wait for the delay to expire and then copy the window.

If you miss, you can press the grab button again and try again. If you select too large of an area, you may want to use the middle button in the xv image window to select a smaller rectangular region, and then crop the image to that rectangle.

Finally, press the SAVE button on the xv control panel. Give your image a name (for example, pump.gif), and save it. You can also select an image format:

GIF and JPEG formats can be used on web pages. GIF format is best for computer generated images. JPEG is best for scanned images. Computer generated images generally get larger on disk and appear blury when saved as JPEG, as the JPEG compression does not work well with high contrast edges and solid color regions.
TIFF format may be accepted by some word processors, although most will accept GIF. Be sure to select LZW image compression when saving as tiff, as this saves significant space.
BMP is the native windows image format, and should be accepted by all windows applications. However, the BMP format does not support compression at all, so the images will be very large.

SSD 31-Mar-97