Merge Screens Tolerance

Where to find it

• Authoring Settings > Recording > Simulation / Documentation category > Merge Screens Tolerance setting

Purpose

It is possible to merge Steps in a simulation. This effectively combines multiple Steps into a single Step, which will contain the Screenshot from the first Step, and all macros from the merged steps. Merging can be done automatically during recording (see Auto Merge), or manually during editing in Producer (either for all Steps or for selected Steps).

This setting (Merge Screens Tolerance) determines the 'similarity' that two screenshots must have to be merged into a single Step. This property is specified as a percentage, which can be interpreted as "If no more than this percentage of the pixels on the screens are different, then they can be merged". Note that this is always comparing the first (potential merge) screenshot against the next (one) screenshot; if the selection contains more than two Steps (or the entire simulation is being analyzed) then (for example) Steps 1 and 2 are compared and merged, then Steps 1 (now merged) and 3 are compared, and so on. The first screenshot in the selection being merged is always retained as-is; there is no actual combining of screenshot images.

Use

Bizarrely, this setting can be specified to 6 decimal places - at least the default value is 0.400000. This is 0.4%. Which means that in screenshots of 1280x800 pixels, an area of (not more than) 128x32 can be completely different between two screens, and they will be merged.

See Also

• Authoring Settings > Recording > Simulation / Documentation category > Auto Merge setting