From: Bogdan Costescu (bogdan.costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De)
Date: Tue Nov 26 2002 - 12:58:40 CST

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Marc Baaden wrote:

> 2) If you keep swaping working machines, and one has eg a display resolution
> of 1600x1200, whereas the other has 1024x768, you may still want to
> achieve the same output. So you need some machine/display independent
> setting.

Well, the aspect ratio has to be kept, anything else is (in my experience)
only relative. You can get different graphic window sizes (John has given
an example, we usually do it with the command line parameter "-size x y"),
but keep the aspect ratio. Then specify in both cases the same size of the
rendered picture (as you do want to look the same on paper) which has the
same aspect ratio as the window, but when viewing the result, just let
some graphics file viewer do the zoom ("Fit in") relative to the current
screen size.

> 3) The question arose in a script automating the process, eg trying to
> avoid that someone has to check everything by hand.

Well, we've had some bad experience with this: trying to make a movie from
a trajectory, the molecule was at some point moving too much such that
several atoms went beyond the borders; within the next several frames,
they came back and the error was only apparent after we looked at the
complete movie (which meant putting together several such pieces and doing
a bit of editing).

> then afterwards cropping the blank.

Yeah, but how do you do this ? You need something that in audio is called
"volume maximizer" which amplifies the signal only such that the biggest
peak is amplified to close to the maximum available range. But 3D graphics
is not as easy.. at least to me :-)

-- 
Bogdan Costescu
IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De