Dear Avogadro Community,
I am trying to export my beautiful crystal into an eps file. It works fine with png (for some reason, very low-resolution): the colors are exactly the same as I see them in the Avogadro window, bright and glossy. But when I choose eps, the atoms look different: matte and dark instead. Is there anything I can do to have the same style for the eps file? Thank you in advance for any replies!
It may be difficult to include glossiness/shiny surfaces by programs (a recent compilation) into true vector formats.
Assuming you want to use the illustration for a poster, or a publication in a journal, determine the dimension of the illustration intended (e.g., how many centimetres or inches is the width of a single column). With 2.54 cm = 1 in in mind, determine the the number of pixels in this direction with the minimal resolution (dpi) set by the publisher (an example). Say, the figure is for a column of 8.85 cm (as by above style sheet); divided by 2.53 this equates to 3.48 inches, and if the minimum resolution is 400 dpi, the image to be prepared should be 1394 pixel wide.
The best approach now is to generate an illustration this wide. If the intermediate format e.g., is .pov of povray, you may adjust these dimensions of the illustration to be rendered. If it is a vector illustration (true .(e)ps or .pdf), you may scale this in e.g., inkscape and save it again (rescaled) in the format (preferentially again as vector file).
To Geoff Hutchison, the moderator: May this discussion board be enabled to accept small attachments like a .zip file, less than or equal to 2 MB in volume, to ease exchange of data intended for discussion?
Thank you very much for your prompt reply. I decided to publish the figures without the glossy surfaces, since it’s impossible now.
For the future, could you tell me how I can change the resolution of generated .png files in the export? I see no options during the export.
For the direct export of .png by Avogadro, the resolution seems to be fixed. pnginfo reports an image width of 1015, and length of 641 pixels. However you may opt for the export as .pov file for rendering into a .png by povray. Either a) invoke a direct processing from the CLI (like povray example.pov) to yield a 800 by 600 px .png, or b) write an .pov.ini file which on processing sets some parameters explicitly (not only the translated .pov with the model data) like the one below in double size (compared to the former, any entry past the semi-colon ; is considered a comment):
; typical content of a pov.ini file:
Input_File_Name=/home/guest/Desktop/export_from_avogadro.pov
Output_to_File=true
Output_File_Type=N
Output_File_Name=/home/guest/Desktop/output.png
Height=1200
Width=1600
Antialias=true
Antialias_Threshold=0.1
Display=true
Pause_When_Done=true
Warning_Level=5
Verbose=false
Position, direction, colour, geometry of the light source (parameters set with light_source in the .pov written by Avogadro) may require some adjustments to match the ones (implicitly) set/used for the direct .png export. This will require some reading of PovRay’s documentation and testing. In this respect, other programs (e.g., CCDC’s Mercury) are a bit more consistent to set up and use primary/secondary, etc. lights.
Once generated, you downscale the image to the dimension (e.g., inkscape on individual / xnconvert on batches of images via a GUI, or convert command of imagemagick for the CLI).
At the moment, it’s set by the size of your rendering window.
People have asked to be able to set the size of the export, and it’s a good request.
As an example, in addition to user-defined dimensions, CCDC’s Mercury, if opting for the direct export as a .png, offers preset dimensions of i) 640 x 480 px, ii) 800 x 600 px, or iii) 1024 x 768 px.