The alt-g command displays SVG code for the graphical music seen in the notation editor.

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:

show SVG code for graphic notation.
Pressing alt-g will open up the SVG code for the current page of notation.

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.

Capturing screenshot of notation
Taking a screenshot of the displayed notation.

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:

Loading SVG into GIMP
Options window when opening SVG 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:

Loading SVG into GIMP
Options window when opening SVG in 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:

From GIMP to MS Word
Result of copy/pasting from GIMP to 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.

in Inkscape
Loading extracted SVG into Inkscape and adding markup.

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:

EMF loaded into Word
Loading an EMF file into MS Word that was saved from Inkscape.

Here is an example of saving the edited image as an SVG again (sample2.svg) and then loading into a web browser:

Inkscape image loaded into Chrome
Loading an SVG file into Google Chrome that was saved from Inkscape.