GMS 7.

0 TUTORIALS
Printing and Exporting Images

1 Introduction
This tutorial describes how to print and export images from GMS.

1.1 Contents

1 Introduction.........................................................................................................................1
1.1 Contents .......................................................................................................................1
1.2 Outline..........................................................................................................................1
2 Getting Started ....................................................................................................................2
3 Graphical Output................................................................................................................2
3.1 Printing.........................................................................................................................2
3.2 Saving Images ..............................................................................................................2
3.3 Screen Capture .............................................................................................................3
4 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................4

1.2 Outline
This is what you will do:

1. Print

2. Export an image file

3. Copy the GMS screen to the clipboard and paste it into another program

Page 1 of 4 ©Aquaveo
GMS Tutorials Printing and Exporting Images

2 Getting Started
Let’s get started.

1. If necessary, launch GMS. If GMS is already running, select the File | New
command to ensure that the program settings are restored to their default state.

3 Graphical Output
After you have created a GMS project, you may want to include some images of your
project in a printed report or on a web site. There are a number of ways to get graphical
output from GMS. GMS is not designed to be a full-featured drawing package, however,
you will often want to export graphics from GMS and import them into another program
to add things like titles, borders, frames etc.

3.1 Printing
Printing from GMS is simple. There are two commands in the File menu related to
printing: Print and Page Setup. You can use these two commands to send whatever is
currently displayed in the graphics window to a printer. As printing from GMS is
straightforward, we won’t actually have you print anything now.

3.2 Saving Images

GMS allows you to export the current display as an image file. A few different image
file types are supported, including:

• .bmp

• .jpg

• .png

• .tif

To export the screen as an image:

1. Select the File|Save As menu command.

2. Change the Save as type option to Bitmap Files (*.bmp).

3. Click the Options button.

By default, the bitmap scale factor is 1, meaning the size of the bitmap is the same as the
current size of the graphics window. Thus the resolution of the bitmap is on the order of
the resolution of your computer screen. This is typically adequate, but if the image is to
be used on a large poster then the individual pixels will become apparent and distracting.
You can improve the quality of the image by increasing the size of the window that the

Page 2 of 4 ©Aquaveo
GMS Tutorials Printing and Exporting Images

image is drawn to. To do that, you can either increase the resolution on your computer
screen or increase the bitmap scale factor in this dialog.

4. Change the Bitmap scale factor to 1.5.

A value of 1.5 means that GMS will render the display to a window which is 1.5 times
greater than the current size of the graphics window.

5. Change the file name to whatever you wish and click the Save button.

You can now open the bitmap file in another program.

3.3 Screen Capture

GMS includes a Screen Capture command in the Edit menu. This command takes
whatever is currently displayed in the graphics window and copies it as a bitmap to the
clipboard. You can then paste the image into another program.

1. Select the Edit| Screen Capture menu command.

Notice that you can specify a bitmap scale factor here also. However, the clipboard has a
limited amount of memory available to it and thus you may not be able to scale your
image up as much as you can when saving the file to disk. If you do a screen capture
then paste into another program and get nothing, try reducing the scale factor.

2. Change the Bitmap scale factor to 1.0 and click OK.

3. If you have Microsoft Word ® installed on your computer, or other software that
can read a Microsoft Word ® file, go to step 10. If you don’t, go to step 9.

4. Open up the word processing program of your choice and paste the image from
the clipboard into your program. This concludes this section of the tutorial. Skip
to the Conclusion, section 4.

5. Open up Microsoft Word ® and open the file tutfiles/Intro/basics/Title Block

Landscape.doc.

6. Select and delete the existing image.

7. Paste the image from the clipboard into the Word ® document.

It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to illustrate all the things you can do with the image
now that it is in Microsoft Word ®, but here are some things that you might want to try.

• Right-click on the image, select Format Picture and change the Layout so that it
is In front of text.

• Change the image size and position it how you want it.

• Crop the image using Word’s ® crop tool in the Picture toolbar.

Page 3 of 4 ©Aquaveo
GMS Tutorials Printing and Exporting Images

• Add arrows and text to point out interesting features of the image.

• Change the logo and name in the title block.

• Use Word’s ® compress tool to reduce the file size

4 Conclusion
This concludes the tutorial. Here are the things that you should have learned in this
tutorial:

• GMS allows you to print and export images in a number of ways

• You can save bitmaps and other types of image files at the screen resolution, or at
higher resolutions

• You can copy the screen (at the screen resolution or higher) to the clipboard and
paste it into other programs.

Page 4 of 4 ©Aquaveo