If you want to save a map then we need to be a little clearer about what that means since each icon is like a map in its own right. With ViewingDale you save out the screen image only with a few options. So you need to pan and zoom to the right part of your map first before saving the view. If you have a grid on then you get a grid with the saved image. You get the annotations and jump markers unless you hide them. The only thing you wont get is the main view border, top banner and bottom status bar which are not part of the map.

To get to the save menu item its on the System Settings or F4 and the bottom option. It brings up a dialog panel like this:


Initially it will have the dots per inch set to your real monitors current DPI rating. The scale will be as you had it at the point of hitting the button. Now with these two values and the current window size, all the rest of the numbers are derived. You can change any of the numbers from here and the related ones will change to match the right math. I.e. you can change DPI to 300 and the width and height in pixels will adjust.

Say you have a 300 DPI printer and want to print a battle map for real miniatures. Then put 300 in the DPI and 60 in the scale (1 in = 5ft ). The rest will adjust and you had better hope your map is small enough to fit on the paper. If you had an A4 300 DPI printer and dont care what the scale comes out at so long as it fits then put 300 in DPI and either 11 in Width or Height depending on whether you want landscape or portrait.

Style is one of two options. As seen on screen or the Color / Alpha pair. The first is what you would expect. The map rendered out to a bit map. The second option saves two bitmaps, one with full color and the second is a greyscale of the combined Alpha / Transparency masking for the whole scene. Ask me if you want to see this or know more.

You set the path or filename and then the format which should be either BMP, JPG or PNG.

It also displays an estimate of the file size tho its pretty rough because its highly dependent on the compression in the PNG / JPG cases tho it should be accurate for BMP.

When it saves the scene it re-renders the whole scene again at the scaling required to get the right output bitmap size. Therefore it does not merely scale the current screen image up or down to fit. So if rendering much larger then detail will be saved not seen on the screen. The grid and the child cut off apply to the save process scaling so that items which were faded out might not be on the save. Same with grid. If the grid was too small to be seen then it might appear on the save if the save image is higher res.

The app has been tested to save at up to 20,000 pixels square in BMP mode. Its a bit less for PNG - something like 14,000 square. The process for the BMP save has been particularly optimized for using a small amount of memory whilst it does it but if saving huge images, it still helps to have a lot of RAM.