Saving and Printing Images

This tutorial addresses three important commands from the File menu, giving a more in depth discussion than that found in the User Manual.  Those commands are File | Print current view..., File | Save current view..., and File | Save VRML world...

What gets saved or printed?

Each of these commands operates on the active subwindow.  Whichever window has the focus when you issue the command to save or print will be the one whose contents are saved or printed.  For instance, the following screenshot shows the Permutation View as the active window; this is evident by its highlighted border.

The only command of the three that does not apply to all subwindows is the Save VRML world... menu item.  VRML (or Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a language for expressing three-dimensional scenes, and as such is only appropriate for describing Cayley diagrams and objects of symmetry.  Thus the Save VRML world... menu item will be grayed out and unusable unless the currently active Group Explorer subwindow is a Cayley diagram window or an object of symmetry window.

File | Print current view...

Clicking this option brings up the standard Windows print dialog box.  You click OK to continue printing, or Cancel to stop.  Before clicking OK, you can choose number of copies, quality of printing, which printer, etc.  The important thing to note with printing an image from Group Explorer is the size of the printed image.

	If printing a Cayley diagram or object of symmetry, the image will be expanded to fill the printed page.  About one-half inch margin is left between the image and the edge of the page.
	If printing any other view (something not three-dimensional), the entire contents of the window (without its border) will be printed at approximately the size they appear on the screen.

For example, consider printing the Permutation View shown in the above screenshot, and also printing a Cayley diagram.  The results would appear something like what's shown in the following diagrams.

These rules have some important ramifications for printing decent images.

	When a Cayley diagram or object of symmetry is stretched to fit across the printer page, it is not rendered at any higher resolution than it appears on the screen.  For this reason, it is good to ensure that the on-screen window is large, if you desire a high-precision printout.
	When printing images from non-3D views (neither Cayley diagrams nor objects of symmetry), resizing the window changes the size of the printed output.

Although this printing facility is not ideal, it is suitable for quick printing needs.  For more sophisticated needs, save the views to files and import them into word processors or image editors from there.

File | Save current view...

Clicking this option brings up the standard Windows save dialog box.  You choose a filename and click OK to continue saving, or Cancel to stop.  The important thing to note with saving an image from Group Explorer is the size of the saved image.  The format of the saved file is a 24-bit bitmap, and the default extension for such files is .BMP.

Unlike with printing, the size of a saved image is always equal to the size of the image on the screen.  Saving a view and loading it into a paint program should make it appear exactly the same on the screen in the paint program (at 100% zoom) as it does in Group Explorer.  Thus the way to ensure you get images the size you want is to eye them up in Group Explorer before issuing the Save command.

Like when printing, the entire contents of the currently active subwindow (without the window border) get saved to the file.  This means, for example, if you're printing a multiplication table, that you should resize the window to be certain you can see as much of the image as you need to.  For example, consider the Group Explorer session depicted in the first image on this page.  If the user clicked on the Multiplication Table, and then clicked File | Save current view..., Group Explorer would save a bitmap image like the one shown here.

The Multiplication Table image saved by Group Explorer

Obviously, therefore, one needs to be careful to move and scale the window to view the desired portion of the multiplication table before saving or printing.

File | Save VRML world...

Clicking this option brings up the standard Windows save dialog box.  You choose a filename and click OK to continue saving, or Cancel to stop.  The important thing to note with saving an image from Group Explorer is the size of the saved image.  The format of the saved file is text containing VRML source code, and the default extension for such files is .wrl (for "world").

Unlike with saving and printing, the size of the view on screen is irrelevant when saving a VRML world.  It is quite appropriate to post such files on a website, and in fact that is the main purpose of this feature.  This way, anyone with a web browser (who doesn't mind installing a small plug-in) can view 3D diagrams and objects, regardless of whether they have installed Group Explorer.

For examples of VRML Cayley diagrams on the web, refer to our VRML Gallery page.