Re: Magnifier in GNOME

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Øyvind:

GNOME has more than one way to magnify.  You didn't really tell us how you started the magnifier, or what you were expecting to see.

The most powerful magnification services are via 'gnopernicus', which is what runs if you select "Screen Reader and Magnifier" from the Applications->Accessibility menu.  This magnifier gives you many more features than the Windows XP magnifier, and you can configure magnification levels independently in X and Y, change the cursor scale size and type, and more.  Gnopernicus also offers speech output if you want that.  To configure these settings, you need to use the 'Preferences'->'Magnifier' dialogs in gnopernicus.

Magnification services in GNOME are provided by a package called 'gnome-mag'; gnopernicus uses gnome-mag, but you can also run these services "stand alone" if all you want is a mouse-following basic magnifier.  To run this standalong service, type "magnifier" from the command line.  "magnifier --usage" will give you a list of command line options - they allow you to specify magnification level (aka 'zoom', for instance "-z4"), fullscreen (-f) or splitscreen (-v) mode, mouse-tracking (-m) and allow you to specify the source and target screens.  In order to use "2 screens" you don't need two physical monitors, it's possible to specify a "virtual" display, so you can do fullscreen magnification on your current PC.  (Fullscreen is definitely better because you avoid the problems of the magnified area overlapping the application areas of interest.)

There is lots of capability there, especially in the most recent versions of gnome-mag in which fullscreen mode works better - the issue is getting your system configured for the virtual screen, and knowing how to configure the various options.

If you want to send an email telling exactly what configuration/settings you'd like to start with, I can send a sample command line for 'magnifier'. You might try experimenting with the following, for a start:

"magnifier -v -m -z4"

For fullscreen mode, if you modify your XF86Config file (or XOrg.conf, on the newest systems) to enable the 'dummy' (virtual) display on screen :0.1, then GNOME will use both DISPLAYs and you can either run "magnifier -f -s:0.1 -t:0.0" or configure gnopernicus to do fullscreen magnification using source :0.1 and target :0.0 (by editing the 'default zoomer' from the gnopernicus magnification preferences dialog).

Best regards,

- Bill

> Now back to Linux.
> I installed linux and as a workstation with GNOME and tried the
> magnifier but it was no good at all.
> This was a very huge disappointment because I had hoped that GNOME and
> Linux could offer a similar magnifer like MS windows that helps me a lot.
>
> I could not even change the magnification level and I find the magnifier
> strange to the one in Windows XP.
> But I have heard that the GNOME magnifier is for 2 screen solutions only
> and on this pc I don't have 2 monitors...
>
> Is there other magnifiers that I could try?
> If someone of you are familiar with the magnifier in Windows XP and know
> of similar magnifiers for Linux I would be very thankful.
>
> regards
> Øyvind

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