Quick Work

There will be times when you will need to make a quick image file for some purpose: to make a poster, decorate a web page, make a graphic for a course related paper, or other purposes. There are several tools on Athena that will help you do that. Most reside in the graphics locker. If a tool is mentioned and its locker is not named, presume that it lives in the graphics.

For a quick and dirty drawing, you have your choice of xpaint, gimp, as well as the Applix and Open Office suites, both of which have drawing components. All these are available from your Athena menu bar. For a more schematic drawing, you can use xfig, tgif, in the sipb locker, dia, in its own dia locker, or xcircuit in the xcircuit locker.

To edit an image file for cropping, resizing, color corrections, or other quick tasks, there is the xv utility in the graphics locker. Just type add graphics; xv filename and when the window showing the image pops up, right-click on it to see what xv can do for you.

To grab a screenshot in the Athena GNOME environment, jsut press the PrintScreen button. A dialog will show up to let you save your screen in the PNG format. You can also use the utilities xdpr, and xv for the same purpose, as well as the GIMP.

To make file conversions at the command line there is a whole slew of utilities in the graphics locker. If the convert utility (on the Suns it is known as imconvert) can't do it for you, then just type the suffix of your input graphics file name (for example, athena% png) and then the tab key, and a whole list of utilities should pop up. For more information, type add graphics; man convert and man mogrify.

To make animated image files, the graphics locker containes two very useful utilities, gifsicle and animate. Both have manual pages with instructions for using them.