Missing image export options

Tried the last version today. While a lot of new features have been implemented and the interface became better, some key features disappeared, particularly direct POV-Ray image export. The PNG graphics lacks an option to adjust image resolution, only by default.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “direct POV-Ray image export.” Do you want to run POV-Ray directly? We found that to be problematic for many users, which is why we simply generate the POV-Ray input file. (And we’d like to support a much wider range of rendering tools.)

While I agree that exporting to PNG would be nicer to have some options, that didn’t exist in previous versions either. (Or am I mistaking what you’re looking for.)

Help welcome!

I meant that in the previous version I used (1.2), the image can be rendered in POV-Ray directly from Avogadro via the Export menu option. This is quite convenient because I do not need to install and run POV-Ray separately. I have never had any problem with that (I wonder what kind of problems the others had). I think it would be nice to return that option in addition to generating the POV-Ray input file. Some more options for the image export would benefit too (e.g., specification of the image size, format, etc.).

What OS are you using? I don’t remember packages of Avogadro 1.x that included POV-Ray, although perhaps some of the Windows installers did.

The problem is what you expect - if you don’t have POV-Ray installed, it will attempt to run and fail. Very frustrating to inexperienced users.

I use Win10 and have Avogadro 1.2 installed. I do have POV-Ray installed too. I simply indicate a pathway to POV-Ray executable in the Avogadro export menu. That’s it. However, this option is absent in version 1.95, which is quite inconvenient. Another useful functions would be movie rendering.

Just in case the structure file is e.g., .xyz or .sdf and your current road block does not resolve well enough: Read the file with Jmol (free as in free beer, cross platform once you have some Java support) which you may run right after decompression of the .zip from sourceforge (file Jmol.jar is the executable).

Then, a click on the fourth tile in the GUI both generates both the .pov and .pov.ini and renders a .png from a menu offering you some adjustments, too.