Re: [Visualpython-users] Why no screenshot function?

[Bruce S. <Bru...@nc...>]

That could be useful; perhaps the reason it's not there is that there hasn't 
been much need expressed for such a facility. Note that on Windows and Mac (and 
maybe on Linux?) there are facilities built-in to get screen shots. For example, 
Alt-Print Screen on Windows captures a bitmap image of the active window, which 
can then be pasted into various applications, including Word.

Converting to jpeg is NOT a small job. A jpeg is extremely different from a 
bitmap image. Any easily-implemented screen capture will necessarily be a bitmap 
image, and therefore necessarily low-resolution for print purposes.

For many purposes one wants something much better than a bitmap image. In the 
contributed section of vpython.org the povexport utility generates a file that 
can be read by the freeware POV-ray application to generate a high-resolution 
ray-traced image of a VPython scene.

A separate issue is that it would be very useful, and probably not very 
difficult, to generate a PostScript file from a (two-dimensional) graph in order 
to produce high-resolution prints of graphs.

Bruce Sherwood

Anders Wallin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Why is there no screenshot function in visual?
> 
> I've looked a bit at SDL/OpenGL in C++ under Ubuntu, and it's about a
> 5 min job to google for the correct screenshot code and get it
> working. It saves a 24-bit TGA-file, but I imagine changing that to
> bmp or jpeg or similar is not a big job either. I must be missing
> something?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Anders