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Screen Magnifier -- how to activate?

Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2009 3:57 am
by gumby
Synaptic tells me that gmag, the screen magnifier, is already installed on my Gloria system. But I can't find it. I finally found a reference to screen magnification under Simple CompizConfig settings in Control center but I can't figure it out. It gives 2 options: screen zoom and area zoom. It says the default zoom in shortcut is <Super>Button4 for Screen zoom and <Shift><Super>Button4 for area zoom. I am not sure what the "Super" key is -- is it the Windows key? I tried that and nothing happens to the screen. And what do they mean by "button4"? The 4 key? I tried that and it didn't work. Or must it be a 4 key from a numeric keypad? I have a laptop and don't have a numeric keypad, so I tried it with the regular 4 key and it didn't work. Can someone tell me how to use this screen magnifier feature?

Also, can anyone recommend other magnifier programs that will work with Mint? I searched a long time for one for Windows but almost all of them had the same shortcoming -- if you are magnifying a window, you can't enter magnified text in the program underneath the magnifier, which means the magnification is only useful for reading, not working. Finally I found a program called Magical Glass that allowed you to enter text in the magnified window. But, alas, there is no Linux version of that program.

I have to revise one thing I wrote: Synaptic did indicate, an hour ago, that Gmag was installed. Now it doesn't. Now when I search for Gmag in Synaptic, I find nothing. I have no idea why. Synaptic doesn't seem to be working now.

Re: Screen Magnifier -- how to activate?

Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2009 4:37 am
by DrHu
In the Terminal
  • locate mag
    locate gmag
/usr/share/doc/gnome-mag/README
Standalone Command-line interface
=================================
gnome-mag provides a command-line interface for standalone use,
although its primary goal is to provide a set of magnification
services for use by other client applications and assistive
technologies.

For information on the "magnifier" command-line utility, type
"magnifier --help" or "magnifier --usage" after installing
gnome-mag.
--the readme file for gnome-mag, magnifier is the standalone program name, in the readme file it indicates you also need gnome-common installed. This is not installed in normal Linux Mint 7 installation..
  • apt search gnome-common
    p gnome-common - common scripts and macros to develop with
    p xchat-gnome-common - a new frontend to the popular X-Chat IRC c
Searching..
http://www.magnifiers.org/links/Screen_ ... NIX_Linux/
--not all the links are updated, so try the name in a separate search
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Multimed ... 2278.shtml
If you try quax, either use alien to convert the *.rpm package or install from the source files..