User preferences help to set default values and adjust preference values that are used in various product features. User preferences window can be opened from the Preferences icon button in the lower left-hand corner. It can also be opened from the Window → User Preference menu item. The preference window contains several tabs: General, Capture, Annotations, Clip Art, Shortcuts, Integrations, and Advanced. Each of the tabs covers preferences for a group of related product features. In the following, each tab and associated preferences are explained in detail.

General

Common preferences are grouped under the General tab. Main properties and the descriptions are outlined below:

Property Name	Description
Username	Name of the user using the software. By default, the name is obtained from the Windows username. This can be changed to reflect the full real name. This name is used as the email sender name, author name in PowerPoint presentations and in other relevant places.
Language	Supported languages are listed here. Depending on the purchased product, the language may be restricted. By default, it is set to English.
Open Tab Limit	This limits the number of open tabs in the main display area. Each tab corresponds to a captured screen/image in the application. When the limit is reached, any new capture will close the oldest tab and opens a new tab with the newly captured image. Any new capture shows up in the leftmost tab.
Auto Save Interval (min)	Pixtel automatically saves images when tabs are switched or on the application close. However, when working on an image, changes get auto-saved in an autosave file and will be restored on unexpected application failure.

Capture

All capture preferences are grouped in this tab and are outlined below:

Property Name	Description
Capture Delay (ms)	This is the delay between a selection of a capture operation and the actual capture. Depending on the type of the hardware and graphics card, this delay may need to be increased or decreased. A minimum of 300 ms is required. This delay helps to close the main application window before the screen is captured.
Show Magnifier	This is set to true by default. Magnifier shows the magnified image around the cursor for selecting the accurate location. Sometimes, it overlaps with the screen and may not be that useful. It can be disabled by deselecting this flag.
Capture Mouse Pointer	This setting helps to capture cursor as part of the screen capture. If clean screenshots are required without a cursor, this can be deselected.
Display for Full screen Capture	If there are multiple monitors connected to the system, the primary display is set to the working display using Windows display settings. However, sometimes, while working on the main display, fullscreen needs to be captured on the secondary display. This setting helps to override Windows primary display setting. While working on the main display, other displays can be captured in the full screen.
Web Capture Height Limit	If the webpage is a too long, capture height is limited by this value. This helps to handle the long pages with proper main memory usage,
Auto Clipboard Copy	It is set by default. All images captured in the application are automatically copied to Clipboard. This can be disabled if there is a performance issue with copying large images to the clipboard.
New Image Format	In addition to capturing screens, a new image can be created in the application using File→ New Image or using The new Image Icon button, , in the top toolbar. This image format applies to the new blank image created. The default value is Png.
Default Capture Format	Specified image format is used to capture a new screenshot
Timed Capture Delay (sec)	This is the count down counter delay setting. A timer will count down to the value specified by this parameter. By default value is set as 10 seconds.
Continuous Capture	Capture Format: By default capture format is set to Jpeg. It is recommended as Jpeg format takes less space as the continuous captures take several screen captures. This will help to reduce disk space usage. Maximum Limit:If an automated capture is set, this setting helps to limit continuous capture by terminating after a set number of captures. Duplicate Difference(%): If successive captures don't differ by this percentage when compared, they are considered as duplicates. For webinars, a 5% setting is a good value. If the video is being captured, it is better to set a higher value.
New Image Default Size	When a new image operation is performed, a new image with a white background is created. Depending on this parameter, the default screen is either created with the width and height settings in this section or obtains them dynamically based on the application display window size. Auto Size New Image: If selected/checked, the new image is auto-sized based on the application display area. New Image Default Width: The default width of the new image. New Image Default Height: Default height of the new image.
Scrolling Capture	Scrolling capture parameters help to control the scrolling window capture. Only vertical scrolling is supported. Capture Format: By default, the capture format is set to Jpeg. It is recommended as Jpeg format takes less space as the scrolling capture tends to take large-sized captures depending on the page/window size. This will help to reduce disk space usage. Capture Delay: Delay in successive captures. This delay helps to have the browser or window to render all UI elements to render properly. Some webpages take time to render dynamic elements. In faster systems, this value can be reduced to 500 ms. Remove Common Content: Web pages and windows tend to have a common left, top, right, and bottom content and only section of the screen changes when the page is scrolled with Page Down event. This flag helps to remove common content, thus re-creating the page accurately. This property is selected by default. Max Page Down Limit: This limits the maximum number of times page needs to scrolled down before the pages are joined. High limit causes more main memory usage.
Video Capture Settings	Video capture global settings panel opens when the Video Capture Settings button is clicked. This provides comprehensive video setting options. Usually, this is not required for normal screen recording use cases. As much as possible, please don't try to change video capture parameters without fully understanding the impact on video recording quality.

Annotations

Annotation preferences are in the Annotations tab. These parameters are described below.

Property Name	Description
Default Icon Annotation Size	When a font icon is dragged and dropped on the display canvas, this size is set as the default size of the icon. The default value is set as 128 pixels.
Disable Open Canvas	Pixtel supports image canvas and virtual or open canvas. By default, annotations can be placed anywhere. When images are exported or shared, only annotations on the image are flattened for creating the final image for sharing. By disabling this, annotations are restricted only to the image area. By default, this attribute is not selected/checked.
Default Auto Canvas Expansion	When annotations are flattened, some of the annotations may be on the canvas outside the image canvas. When those annotations are flattened, the image canvas needs to be extended to incorporate those annotations. This will auto-expand the canvas. This parameter value is used for padding the canvas to encompass annotations outside the image area.
Enable Undo/Redo Manager	If there are large number of image operations, disabling undo manager helps with performance.
Undo/Redo Levels	Keeping this value very high causes performance issues due to large undo/redo buffer allocation. Best value is around 5.
Shape Color Settings	Shapes have outline, fill and in some cases have text colors. Preset colors can be set for all shapes when selected from this drop-down and the Apply button is clicked. Default width and height remain name. Only the colors change. See the settings with two different presets:
Auto Image Scale Width	When monitors with large resolutions exceeding 1920px width are used in capturing screens, those images can be auto-scaled to fit in the 1920px width while maintaining the aspect ratio. The same applies to import files and drag and drop of web images.
Max Embedded Image Size	Using embedded images helps to compose composite screens very easily. At the same time, there is a large main memory requirement to handle image size. This setting helps to alert the user to the image size limit with a warning message. However, it can be overridden and images can still be imported.
Default Timestamp	Default timestamp content can be specified in this field along with the date-time format. DateTime formats follow C# date-time formatting options. By changing this value, the timestamp display format will change. In addition to the time format, there is a general timestamp template. This template contains parameters which will be substituted with actual value at run time when the timestamp annotation is drawn. Variables that can be used in the template: %Username% - User name specified in the general tab. %ImageDisplayname% - Image display name %Category% - Image category %Subcategory% - Image subcategory %ImageSize% - Image size %ImageDimensions% - Image dimensions %CreatedBy% - Created By %CreatedOn% - Created On %TimeStamp% - Datetime stamp of the current date and time.
Default Rubberstamp	Default Rubberstamp content can be specified in this field along with the date-time format. DateTime formats follow C# date-time formatting options. By changing this value, the timestamp display format will change. In addition to the time format, there is a general timestamp template. This template contains parameters which will be substituted with actual value at run time when the timestamp annotation is drawn. Variables that can be used in the template: %Username% - User name specified in the general tab. %ImageDisplayname% - Image display name %Category% - Image category %Subcategory% - Image subcategory %ImageSize% - Image size %ImageDimensions% - Image dimensions %CreatedBy% - Created By %CreatedOn% - Created On %TimeStamp% - Datetime stamp of the current date and time.

Clip Art

Pixtel provides an easier approach to add Clip Art to the images or new screens. The web provides a large number of Clip Art and image sources which can be used to get Clip Art into images. Note that some of the Clip Art is free and some are copyrighted. Make sure to follow appropriate licensing before using some of the copyrighted Clip Art.

This tab facilitates registering Clip Art/Image sources so that they can be accessed from Draw Toolbox. A set of web resources are included in the product as shown below:

New resources can be added. A maximum of 20 resources is allowed. All these resources show up by clicking on the ClipArt annotation in Draw Toolbox. When editing an image, any of the listed Clip Art web pages can be opened in a web browser, and the images can be dragged and dropped onto the canvas, as shown below:

Shortcuts

Shortcuts help to perform capture operations without opening the application. At the installation time, the application tries to register different shortcuts for various operations. If there are any conflicts with existing applications, it may try to register alternate shortcuts. If none of that is possible, it leaves that operation without any shortcut. Shortcut preferences tab can be used to register shortcuts that are required. Note that application and system may need to be restarted to make the new shortcuts effective. See the shortcut tab below:

Integrations

Pixtel provides a variety of integrations to external cloud and non-cloud applications and systems. Most of the configuration parameters are associated with the respective integration user interface. However, some integrations require global preferences. One of them is email integration which requires configuring default subject and message templates. In this tab, the default mail template is provided which can be configured as shown below:

	DocumentList tag gets replaced with a list of documents.

In the above, %DocumentList%, lists all the selected documents in the email as shown above on the right side.

Advanced

Advanced user preferences are grouped in this tab. The following covers the advanced parameters in the Advanced Tab.

Property Name	Description
Start Pixtel on Startup	By default, this flag is enabled. When Windows restarts, the Application automatically starts in the background.
Auto Update	This is set by default. Application checks for any updates online. If this is disabled, no update check is done. This may be required if there are any external network access restrictions.
Interaction Settings	When interacting with annotation on the image, different handlers show up when an annotation is edited.
Minimize After DragMe	When an image is dragged and dropped on an external application or folder using DragMe, by default Pixtel will be kept minimized for allowing the user to work on the newly dropped image in the external application. However, that behavior can be changed by unsetting this flag.
Enable Slide Numbering	When a set of images are played with Slideshow, it can show slide number along with the slide title. By default, it is set. This can be changed to remove slide numbering,
Enable Console	Disabled parameter.
Default Backup Folder	The default backup folder location is set here. Click on the folder icon to select the folder. Backup files are stored in this folder.
Image Settings	Default additional image settings include: Png Settings: Select the option for improving Png file processing performance. By default Normal is selected. Jpeg Quality: It helps to set the quality of Jpeg image output. If it is set to 100%, the image gets the highest quality and also takes up more space. If it is set too low, say 70%, the quality degrades and reduces the image size. The recommended value is 90%. Tiff Quality: It helps to set the quality of tiff image output. If it is set to 100%, the image gets the highest quality and also takes up more space. If it is set too low, say 70%, the quality degrades and reduces the image size.
Network Settings	When proxy servers are used for external connectivity, these settings are helpful. User Proxy for Internet: if enabled, the application tries to use a Proxy server for internet connectivity. Auto Detect Proxy: if enabled, the application automatically detects proxy server for internet connectivity. IP Address and Port number: Used for connecting to a proxy server if autodetection is disabled.

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