Each and every graphic window in ZEMAX has a “Window” menu item with several submenus.  In particular, the “Export” submenu has various formats by which you can export the displayed graphic window.



The export format options, as indicated above, are Metafile, BMP, JPG High Quality, JPG Medium Quality, and JPG Low Quality.  Selecting any one of the formats will invoke the Windows “Save As” window, from which you can save the file with the desired name and into the desired directory.



The saved file may be imported into many different Windows applications, and may be post-edited if you wish.  For presentations, these files may be easily imported into programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint.  For details on importing these files, please refer to the documentation for that application.

For the JPG export options, medium quality typically produces acceptable image quality with significant reduction in file size.  If you do not plan on re-sizing your images, then any of the export options should be sufficient. 

However, if you plan on modifying the size of your graphics (increasing), it is best to export the image as a Windows Metafile to eliminate the “grainy” or “fuzzy” appearance.

The reason for this is that a Metafile, unlike BitMap or JPG, is a vector graphic format.  The basic idea is that a vector graphic contains a sequence of drawing instructions that describe how to render the image, making it completely device independent¹.  For a complete discussion, click here.  Therefore, you will not degrade the image quality by shrinking or stretching the Metafile.

To demonstrate, the following two diagrams are enlarged images of an originally small Detector Viewer Plot.  One is a Metafile, and one is a BitMap.  It’s fairly obvious as to which one is which.