On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Alon Ben-David wrote:

My name is Alon and I am a graduate student at the Technion, Israel institute of technology. My question is how can I create a transparent background to pictures I am generating with Chimera. I read at the site that not all hardware's permit a transparent background, but I don't know how can I check if my hardware do.

Hello, So the simpliest way is just try. Give the --bgopacity command line argument to chimera (on Windows, by editing the shortcut properties), and see if chimera starts up or not. If not, your hardware doesn't support it. If you're running Linux, you can use the glxinfo command to find what your hardware supports. On Windows, you can use the NVidia NV Pixel Format program. Not sure what tool to use on Mac OS X. Hope this helps, Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab