Hi Jawahar, Unfortunately Chimera is not able to save images without displaying the graphical user interface. The image saving code grabs the image directly from the main window OpenGL graphics buffer, so it also will not work if the main window is covered or iconified. Greg Couch once made a special version of Chimera for Linux using the OSMesa graphics library that could do all the graphics off-screen including saving images. But I don't see that version in the Chimera download archive, and I believe it was made more than a year ago. We recently added raytraced image capture using POVray. Since that does not use the OpenGL graphics it should be able to work in nogui mode but a Chimera bug report indicates that does not work http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?cmd=view&pr=3678&database=chimera and is expected to be difficult to fix. Unfortunately the only option at this time is to have the Chimera window appear to save an image. Tom Jawahar Swaminathan wrote:
Dear Tom, We are interested in making virus capsid pictures for the MSD Database atlas pages using chimera. For this purpose, I was recently provided with a script from Cathy Lawson (RCSB) which makes really pretty images of viral capsids. I attach the script given by Cathy below.
However, since we would want to run chimera in an automatic manner (ideally with the --nogui) option, I've been trying to run the script with --nogui and this appears to conflict with the module tkgui which is called in the program.
So my question: is it possible to make images without necessarily opening up a GUI ?
I would be really grateful if you could clear this us..
best regards,
Jawahar Swaminathan PDB Depositions Macromolecular Structure Database EBI