LDview screenshot has no anti-aliasing

[Merlijn Wissink]

I've been having this problem for quite a while now, but I was too lazy to try to fix it. But, it's starting to annoy me more and more.
Basicly, LDview's screenshot output doesn't match what I'm seeing in LDview. It looks like it doesn't apply the anti-aliasing.

Here's an example: this is what I see on the screen and this is LDview's sceenshot output (please click the button for the original image, Onedrive is compressing the preview).

The strange things is that when LDview is being used by LPub, there's no problem at all and I have the smooth lines and all.

I'm using Windows 10 (but I believe I also had the problem on Windows 8.1, but I can't remember) and I'm using LDview 4.2 Beta 1 (I also tried 4.1 without any success).

Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be?

[Philippe Hurbain]

AFAIK LDView image outputs are never anti-aliased. To get antialiasing I create huge images and resample them at lower resolution with Photoshop. AFAIK (again) that's the way LPub get antialiased images from LDView.

[Merlijn Wissink]

But, I have a lot of older screenshots (1/2 years and older) which are perfectly fine. And as far as I know, I did nothing exceptional to those images, they are all straight out of LDview...

[Philippe Hurbain]

Did you saved image using LDView save image (-> no antialiasing) or made a true screenshot using Print Screen or similar (-> antialiasing)?

[Merlijn Wissink]

I'm not 100% sure, but I am pretty sure I used LDview's screenshot feature.

[Travis Cobbs]

It is possible that LDView creates antialiased screenshots when running on certain video cards. It's been so long since I worked on that code that I honestly don't remember. But Philo's suggestion to render larger and then down-sample with a graphics program is really the only way to be sure. Note that if you have edge lines enabled, it's best to set their thickness to a value greater than 1; otherwise they'll be really thin in the scaled-down image.

There are two other things you can try. Set the "IgnoreVBO" setting to 1. You can do this either on the command line using -IgnoreVBO=1 or in the registry. Search for ZoomMax in the LDView help file until you get to the part where it tells you the registry value to create. Change "ZoomMax" to "IgnoreVBO", and set the value to 1. If that doesn't help, then after you have done that, check the "Don't use Pixel Buffer" option in the Save Snapshot dialog. (The corresponding registry/command line setting name for that is IgnorePBuffer.)

Please note that if you have both of these things set, then LDView will actually draw the snapshot into a hidden buffer on the screen, so any other windows that obscure any part of the LDView window at any time during the snapshot save can cause problems (which is why it doesn't do it that way by default).