Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
Re: Importing IDL plots to Powerpoint on Mac
In article <1108736592.609120.299650@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, "wcramer" <wcramer@fit.edu> wrote: > What's the best way to transfer IDL plots to Powerpoint so that they > look nice? All of the ways that I've tried so far don't look very > presentable. I don't have a solution for Powerpoint. I have always attributed graphics issues to Powerpoint doing dumb things with PS and PDF files. (Intentionally or not, who can say?) Keynote imports PDF files very easily. Just drag them onto the slide and re-size as needed. Keynote does smooth bitmaps embedded in PDF files (see thread from a week or two ago). This is usually undetectable, unless the bitmaps are very low resolution. You can export your Keynote presentation to PDF (or even Powerpoint). Another option is TeX. If you know TeX, you can make your presentation directly to PDF and present it with Adobe Reader. The learning curve for Tex is steep at first, but once you figure out how to use it, it's great. I no longer fight with MS Word. Even better, it's free. I recommend TeXShop http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html, which is a slick TeX front-end for OS X, but there are others. A nifty little program for adding math to presentations is the Latex Equation Editor. Enter the Tex commands in the window, hit the button to typeset the equation, drag it into the Keynote window. http://evolve.lse.ac.uk/software/EquationEditor/ Ken Bowman
wcramer wrote: > What's the best way to transfer IDL plots to Powerpoint so that they > look nice? All of the ways that I've tried so far don't look very > presentable. I create PS output - that seems to produce the nicest output in IDL. I then use the ImageMagick utility "convert" to create a gif/png file from the PS file. These image files I then import into ppt. Or stick them on a webpage. Works well - and you can do it all in your IDL code via the SPAWN command. The onscreen fonts in IDL are too primitive to do a straight screen capture (e.g. via IDL's tvread or ImageMagick's import) to an image file (although I don't think that's necessarily an IDL problem). paulv -- Paul van Delst CIMSS @ NOAA/NCEP/EMC
In article <1108736592.609120.299650@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, wcramer <wcramer@fit.edu> wrote: > What's the best way to transfer IDL plots to Powerpoint so that they > look nice? All of the ways that I've tried so far don't look very > presentable. > > Thanks One way that seems to work reasonably well is to plot on a large X window, plot with thick lines and large characters, grab with tvrd and write to jpeg, and then shrink to fit in powerpoint. e.g., window,xsize=640*2,ysize=480*2 !p.thick=2 & !p.charsize=1.5 plot,...,thick=!p.thick*2,charsize=!p.charsize*2 write_jpeg,jpegfilename,tvrd(/true),/true If you use the Z device, you can make the window even larger and the lines thicker. Vinay -- ____________________________________________________________ __________________ kashyap@head.cfa.harvard.edu 617 495 7173 [CfA/P-145] 617 496 7173 [F]
wcramer wrote: > What's the best way to transfer IDL plots to Powerpoint so that they > look nice? All of the ways that I've tried so far don't look very > presentable. > > Thanks We are using pstoimg -type png -aaliastext -flip r90 -density 150 file1.ps file2.ps ... -crop is another useful parameter man pstoimg NAME pstoimg - Convert a PostScript file to a bitmap image using Ghostscript and the Netpbm utilities DESCRIPTION pstoimg iterates over the given input files and runs them through Ghostscipt. The resulting pnm (portable anymap files) are processed with different Netpbm tools (crop- ping, color mapping, aligning, ...) and finally converted into (currently) either GIF or PNG format. The bitmaps can now be included e.g. in WWW pages. The PostScript file is converted as is. If a valid bound- ing box is found (EPS format), then only this area is con- verted. The image is not cropped by default. .... cheers Reimar -- Forschungszentrum Juelich email: R.Bauer@fz-juelich.de http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg-i/ ============================================================ ====== a IDL library at ForschungsZentrum Juelich http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg-i/idl_icglib/idl_lib_intro. html
Thanks for all of your suggestions. I've been itching to try them, but can't seem to be able to install the necessary Ghostscript utility. I'm on a Mac OS X machine with no C compiler to compile the source. Is there a way to get the binaries that I need? Thanks