NWE Help: Utilities: Screen Magnifier

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The screen magnifier, which is a small utility program called Xmag, allows you to magnify the screen display so you can see individual pixels more easily. While useful for some work, most NWE students won't use the screen magnifier in day-to-day computing. Xmag is also limited because it cannot save files to disk. You may wish to use The Gimp if you need more precision control of magnified screenshots.

To launch the screen magnifier, click on the NWE menu, select Utilities, then select Screen magnifier. After a short delay, you'll see a small cursor which looks like an upside-down L on your screen:

Xmag screen magnifier area selection cursor

This cursor determines where the start of the magnified area will begin. From wherever you click, a magnified area will be displayed. The area will be about 300 pixels square.

Click on any part of the screen with this special cursor, and the following window will come up:

Xmag screen magnifier window

This window shows a magnfied area of the screen at the time you clicked with the special cursor. Note that the magnified area does not update if your screen changes.

There are five buttons in the screen magnifier window. Here is what they do:

close

Close the window and exit the screen magnifier program.

replace

Activate the special cursor again. When the mouse is clicked, the area selected will replace the contents of the current window.

new

Activate the special cursor again. When the mouse is clicked, the area selected will appear in a new window.

select

Select the information in this window and place it on the screen magnifier clipboard.

paste

Paste information selected from another screen magnifier window into this window.

Note that the select and paste functions do not allow you to paste between applications.