Pressing alt-g will cause a new window to open up containing the SVG code for the currently visible page of music notation. Here is an example of the feature in action:
Here is the SVG image extracted as in the above figure after it has been saved to a file. The SVG code can then be copy/pasted into a text editor and saved to the hard disk. This command is useful for extracting a musical example for use as a static image in a paper/article or website.
Converting notation into bitmap images
Many applications (such as MS Word) cannot load SVG image files, so the SVG data must be converted into a bitmap in order to use the image in such programs. There are two ways of generating bitmaps of VHV notation: a simple method is to do a screen-shot. How to do this will be different in the various operating systems. In MacOS, type command-shift-4 and then drawing a box around the notation you want to capture. You may also want to type alt-f first so that the background color of the notation is white.
A more refined method of extracting a bitmap for a full page can be done by saving the SVG image displayed by the alt-g command and then opening in GIMP. Here is the SVG import dialog window when opening the SVG image in GIMP:
Set the pixel width/height to a large number (such as about 2000 pixels wide) to generate a high-resolution bitmap from the SVG image. Here is an example of the image loaded into GIMP:
The checkered gray background indicates that the image is transparent. This is useful when displaying the bitmap on a colored background. You can then save the image, or select-all/copy/paste it into another application such as MS Word:
Editing as a vector-graphics image
If you want to preserve the vector-graphics format of the SVG image, but want to edit to make changes or additions (such as analysis markup with boxes or arrows, etc.), then use Inkscape, which is a free open-source vector-graphics editor.
From Inkscape, you can save to the Enhanced Metafile format which is an old Microsoft vector-graphics format that can be loaded into MS Word. Note in the following figure that transparencies and layering of markup in Inkscape might not export well to the EMF format:
Here is an example of saving the edited image as an SVG again (sample2.svg) and then loading into a web browser:
