| Re: thumbnails [message #24033 is a reply to message #24006] |
Tue, 06 March 2001 12:55   |
nobody
Messages: 12
Registered: September 1995
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Junior Member |
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On Tue, 06 Mar 2001 17:50:59 GMT, Mike Chinander <mchinand@midway.uchicago.edu>
wrote:
> In article <MPG.150ed0047c674e33989d7f@news.frii.com>,
> David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
>> steve (nobody@nowhere.com) writes:
>>
>>> As I suspected, thanks for confirming that. As long as I'm talking to a
>>> guru: is there an image format I can use that will display nice in say,
>>> powerpoint, and also produce nice postscript output? I write all my
>>> routines to display to my X display (in Linux) and then I switch to the
>>> PS device and send everything to a .ps file, making some minor adjustments
>>> for special cases (like bitmapped images mixed with line-art). This makes
>>> very nice postcript output, but now I'm trying to fix what should not
>>> need to be fixed: I'm taking a scalable format (postscript) and producing
>>> a non-scalable thumbnail (bitmap) for display. I don't want to just dump
>>> my X display to a bitmap format like tiff, gif, jpeg. Since I'm using a
>>> *nix-like system, is there something else I should be doing? I'm a little
>>> afraid of things like Windows Meta File, since Win-xx usually makes postscript
>>> a real chore, and actually, I don't see it in my IDL help. Any suggestions?
>>
>> You might try something like CGM output. Some
>> software is able to read and display those
>> files nicely. I've never used it myself.
>>
>> I tend to use JPEG files for nearly everything.
>> Sometimes if I need great looking viewgraphs
>> I'll do the "scale everything by 4" trick that
>> I have talked about previously in this newsgroup.
>> I use the Z-buffer at 4x resolution, use true-type
>> fonts, set all thickness, character sizes, etc to
>> 4x. Take a snapshot, reduce the image by 4x, and
>> make a JPEG file out of that. It produces some
>> lovely viewgraphs...sometimes. :-)
>>
>> I'm not sure you are going to have your cake and
>> eat it too with IDL. (Or with your computer, for
>> that matter. The only computer I know of that was
>> fabulous at showing great looking preview images
>> was the Next computer using Display PostScript as
>> it's rendering language.)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> David
>
> What I have used to do this is convert the eps file with pstoedit to the
> .fig format and then edit this file (change linethickness, fontsize, add a
> background, etc) with xfig. After doing that you can save (and scale) it
> to a variety of graphics formats. I find this very useful for converting
> plots that I have saved in eps format and then sometime later need to
> convert it to jpeg or some other format suitable for inclusion in
> Powerpoint.
>
> --Mike Chinander
> --
> --
> Michael Chinander University of Chicago
> m-chinander@uchicago.edu (773)834-5101 (Voice) (773)702-0371 (Fax)
that was helpful, Mike, thanks. I looked at xfig and pstoedit, it will be
useful in the future for me. However, as I used vector-drawn fonts in most
of the figures (too lazy to us psfonts, usually they change the drawing area)
importing into xfig the vector fonts are inumerable line-segments that seems
a waste of time to go and delete-edit on a character by character basis. If
I had used ps-fonts, this might have been easier. I was hoping to script the
whole job, which looks like it could be done, but the forementioned weakness
makes me think I'll just bag it. I find converting to pdf format and using
acrobat might be the best solution, unlike MS-powerpoint (or even Sun-Star
Office), it renders the pdf-from-ps pretty well. I'm going to use the ps2psf
command line on my linux system. pstoedit web-page says that one weakness of
pstoedit is that it bit-maps all but a select set of standard postscript
fonts. If I had a nickel for every font problem I've encountered over the
years !!!!.....
--
Steve S.
yubdub
steve@CLOTHESmailaps.org
remove CLOTHES before replying
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