From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 04 2002 - 21:56:25 CST

Dear Peter,
  At the present time, the scene export code in
VMD doesn't do anything with the text tokens. In general,
ray tracers don't draw points or lines, only space filling
primitives, which makes rendering of text problematic.
I've considered implementing a post processing step for
rendered images which would composite text into the rendered
images. A more general solution will probably be needed when
we implement more general text annotation capabilities in VMD,
though I can't give you a time estimate for availability such a
feature at this time. We're running into similar issues with the
movie making scripts, where people want to add copyright or contact
information into their movies at creation time. I've got a solution
for that using NetPBM utilities. You could use the same technique
to annotate a single ray traced VMD image if you like. I plan to
make the new movie script available tomorrow after I do some more
testing on it. It uses the 'ppmlabel' program included with NetPBM
to add text as a post-processing step. Let me know if you need
something more sophisticated than this.

Thanks for using VMD,

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 06:04:03PM +0200, Peter Varnai wrote:
> Dear VMD-users,
>
> Could someone tell me how I could put a simple text
> in a picture using VMD? I tried to play the file below:
>
> draw color yellow
> draw text {0 0 -1} "TEXT"
> ...
> mol load pdb pdbfile
> ...
> axes location off
> display projection Orthographic
> scale by 1.4
> render POV3 plot.pov povray +H1000 +W852 -I%s -O%s.png +A0.0 +FN16
> quit
>
> but the TEXT is there on the screen, not in the picture.
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> Peter

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078