By now you are probably wondering how to produce a printout of what you see on the screen. To do this, you will have to generate a PostScript version of the display window. Presently, this is a two step process involving both VMD and an external program such as display. The process begins with the render menu. If you activate this form, you will see a browser listing of several rendering options available from VMD. A few of these will be discussed in more detail in the next section, but the one which interests us at the moment is "snapshot." If you click on this option and hit "Go," VMD will use the SGI screen capture program snapshot to generate an RGB rendering of the display window. By default this RGB rendering is stored in a file called snap.rgb, but this can be changed in the render menu if necessary. To convert snap.rgb to a printable PostScript file, you should type exec display snap.rgb in the VMD console window. This will launch the graphics program display. The RGB picture will pop up on the screen. In this picture, press down with the rightmost mouse button to bring up xv controls. Click the Save option and choose PostScript as the output format. You will now have a printable file called snap.ps in your directory.
VMD provides a number of other rendering alternatives for your images. All options are listed in the render menu. One of the most popular techniques is to use Raster3D. If you click on this entry and hit the "Go" button, VMD will convert its data to a form suitable for Raster3D and will then call this program to process your image. Try it, but be patient. It takes Raster3D time to do its calculations.