| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39613] |
Fri, 04 June 2004 10:00  |
![Paul Van Delst[1] is currently offline](theme/default/images/xoffline.png.pagespeed.ic.XRkd1fkXye.png "Paul Van Delst[1] is currently offline")
Paul Van Delst[1]
Messages: 1157
Registered: April 2002
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David Fanning wrote:
> Paul Van Delst writes:
>
>
>> Maybe it's my level of crotchety-ness increasing with age, but if it takes longer than 5
>> minutes for me to just *look* at my data, I'm not interested. What with everything else
>> going on in the world nowadays, the last thing I need is yet another thing to raise the
>> blood pressure. :o)
>
>
> Maybe you should give tennis a try. :-)
Like I said, the last thing I need....... :oD
Squash is my racquet/ball game. All those walls to stop the little black ball going "out"
are a good thing.
paulv
p.s. Congratulations on your rediscovered joy of tourney tennis.
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39614 is a reply to message #39613] |
Fri, 04 June 2004 09:01  |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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Paul Van Delst writes:
> Maybe it's my level of crotchety-ness increasing with age, but if it takes longer than 5
> minutes for me to just *look* at my data, I'm not interested. What with everything else
> going on in the world nowadays, the last thing I need is yet another thing to raise the
> blood pressure. :o)
Maybe you should give tennis a try. :-)
Cheers,
David
P.S. I had an epiphany last week after nearly walking
off the court in the middle of a match I was playing
poorly in: I am *not* my tennis game! Since then I've
played (nearly every night in an on-going tournament)
with an interested, but detached, attention. I just
pay attention to the ball. If it goes in, great. If
it goes out, great. Two nights ago in the middle of
a match I was losing (to a young kid, of course) I
suddenly realized that for the first time in about
five years I was actually *enjoying* myself in a
tournament match. But not only that, I was
so relaxed I was hitting shots I used to hit 20
years ago. Who says you can't teach an old dog
new tricks!?
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39615 is a reply to message #39614] |
Fri, 04 June 2004 08:46 |
Paul Van Delst[1]
Messages: 1157
Registered: April 2002
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Senior Member |
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David Fanning wrote:
> Paul Van Delst writes:
>
>
>> Once I got it working, I used the iSurface iTool so I could look at a surface and rotate
>> it etc. Well, it took forever to render the surface and attempting to rotate it was
>> pointless since there was no real-time response... it was just sooo slow. Haven't used
>> them since - recalling the last direct graphics SURFACE command and altering my AZ keyword
>> is faster than iSurface.
>
>
> Well, maybe, but object graphics are awfully nice
> for doing surfaces.
I don't know what this means. SURFACE/SHADE_SURF is also nice for doing surfaces - it also
has the clear advantage that when I hit the enter key, I get immediate feedback, i.e. my
data displayed onscreen. Maybe the OG stuff on my computer is slow because I like to look
at large data sets. But, then, why is the DG output so fast?
> Have you tried FSC_SURFACE?
I just downloaded it and gave it a shot - very nice. The one thing I want to do with
surfaces, rotate them with the mouse, was actually easy to do and relatively speedy.
Thanks for the tip - the code has been added to my idl/user_contrib directory. I tried
doing the same with iSurface and, well, frankly, the user interface totally bamboozles me.
It's difficult to play with iSurface since because any action on my part takes so long to
show up onscreen, it gets hard to connect action and reaction. The end result is that
there's no carrot to entice me to investigate the capabilities of these tools any further.
I tried surfacing a DIST(1000) array with DG SURFACE (fast), iSurface (slooow), and
fsc_surface (slower than DG surface, but faster than iSurface). I'm still waiting for the
OG surfacing of a DIST(5000) array to display (3minutes after the DG equivalent finished
its ~30s march across the window.)
> Maybe your computer is 10 years old, what with you
> working for a government agency and all. :-)
Nope - it's brand spanking new. :o) It took 3 years to get a replacement tho'. :o(
Maybe it's my level of crotchety-ness increasing with age, but if it takes longer than 5
minutes for me to just *look* at my data, I'm not interested. What with everything else
going on in the world nowadays, the last thing I need is yet another thing to raise the
blood pressure. :o)
paulv
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39627 is a reply to message #39624] |
Thu, 03 June 2004 13:30 |
R.G. Stockwell
Messages: 363
Registered: July 1999
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Senior Member |
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"Kenneth Bowman" <k-bowman@null.tamu.edu> wrote in message news:k-bowman-D069ED.09204703062004@news.tamu.edu...
>
> This will obviously date me, but I have written scientific papers with:
> a typewriter, Script (mainframe text processing tool), a $20k dedicated
> word processor, MacWrite, WriteNow, Word, and now finally TeX.
...
> Ken Bowman
My 2 cents, I strongly recommend IDL postscript into TeX/LaTeX files
for publication quality manuscripts (with a chaser of adobe distiller).
Many publishers provide their own style files, so you can create a
camera ready manuscript that is almost identical to a reprint.
The very best thing about this combo is of course BIBTeX. The
single greatest thing of all time in the history of the infinite multiverse (times two)!
For the nonTeXperts, bibtex keep track off all your references. All you do
is go to webofscience.com (a pay site), download the bibliography of every paper
ever published in science, and create a bibtex database file. Then as you write
papers, and you want to reference a paper, you find it in the database, and
copy-and-paste the key id into your latex file, for instance \cite{dfanning2004}.
Bibtex will then automatically create the reference in your manuscript, and
build the reference list at the end of your paper (or book or whatever).
[and importantly, it will create the references is the required style, since
every journal does uniquely identify itself by its combination of year first,
title in italics, colon between pages, etc]
Another great thing is the modularity of the styles. I had a manuscript in
a two column preprint form, and merely changed the style to use "slides"
rather than "article", and a couple of commands to change the page size,
and viola, my 4ft by 3ft poster for CEDAR is complete. NICE!
It is definitely worth the learning curve to start using TeX if you will be writing
and scientific manuscripts, or any document that will get published.
Cheers,
bob
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39630 is a reply to message #39627] |
Thu, 03 June 2004 08:20 |
K. Bowman
Messages: 330
Registered: May 2000
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Senior Member |
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In article <4a097d6a.0406022302.67f74fd6@posting.google.com>,
MKatz843@onebox.com (M. Katz) wrote:
> (A Voice from Mac-land...)
> The "no-joy" Mac users have is the sinking feeling we get when
> opening MS Office docs full of Windows Metafile graphics in the Mac
> versions of MS Office. Though they advertise and hype interoperability
> and cross-platform blah blah blah, it never quite works, and Windows
> metafiles often don't translate well to the Mac. Sometimes it's fine,
> but it's not reliable.
This will obviously date me, but I have written scientific papers with:
a typewriter, Script (mainframe text processing tool), a $20k dedicated
word processor, MacWrite, WriteNow, Word, and now finally TeX. I was
delighted when WYSIWYG word processors came along (e.g., MacWrite). No
more embedding codes, etc. Microsoft gradually drove everyone else out
of the business, though, through their overwhelming monopoly in the
business world. (I know there are a few alternatives, but generally no
one else can use the files.) I used Word for quite a while, hating it
all the time. It is sad to see what poor design has done to a good idea
(WYSIWYG), not to mention the fact that Word frequently crashes for me
when dealing with imported graphics.
I finally bit the bullet and switched to TeX. There are several great,
free, implementations for OS X. (I use TeXShop.) It does take a while
to learn the basic formatting commands, but it is fast, outputs directly
to PDF, and imports PDF graphics without a problem. Moreover, some
journals give you a break if you provide electronic copy in TeX format.
I generate PS graphics in IDL, tweak in Illustrator if needed, convert
to PDF one of several ways (Illustrator or pstopdf), and import into TeX.
I even do presentations in TeX -- output to PDF and use the slide show
option of Acrobat Reader to show them.
I still have Word, but only to read all of the documents that other
people send me. I am sure that Microsoft will change something in the
Word file format and force us all to buy new versions before long.
Ken Bowman
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39634 is a reply to message #39632] |
Thu, 03 June 2004 00:02 |
MKatz843
Messages: 98
Registered: March 2002
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Member |
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Kenneth Bowman <k-bowman@null.tamu.edu> wrote in message news:<k-bowman-F650D6.15180802062004@news.tamu.edu>...
> In article <MPG.1b27c358d6b12d4f989779@news.frii.com>,
> David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
>
>>> So, does no-one have joy with windows metafiles?
>>> Or directly through the windows clip-board (OLE, and all that)?
>>
>> You might ask the Mac users. They go in for that sort
>> of thing. :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> David
>
> Now that Macs run Unix (OS X), IDL runs under X Windows. If I
> understand the question correctly, its about grabbing images from the
> screen.
(A Voice from Mac-land...)
We're talking about publication-quality which no screen-grab can
offer. The "no-joy" Mac users have is the sinking feeling we get when
opening MS Office docs full of Windows Metafile graphics in the Mac
versions of MS Office. Though they advertise and hype interoperability
and cross-platform blah blah blah, it never quite works, and Windows
metafiles often don't translate well to the Mac. Sometimes it's fine,
but it's not reliable.
Since turnabout is fair play, Mac users shouldn't expect that graphics
we cut and paste into Word will be viewable to our PC-using
colleagues. Much of the time they don't work. MS Office just does not
do cut-and-paste well for cross-platform applications. One should
always use one of the "Insert > Picture from file..." type of dialogs
to get pictures into Word, etc., while minimizing hassles.
<rant>Now how many years have they had to perfect this? And what
exactly are they doing with that $55 Billion of our hard earned cash
sitting around? They're cutting back on their employee health care
coverage, as last I read.</rant>
My methods for getting high quality IDL images into Word are EPS, PNG
(bitmap, but compressed and lossless), JPEG, and, um, EPS. I often
take the IDL output and run it into a great Mac & PC program called
Canvas (ADC, Deneba) which can read files and output just about any
format you like. I can tweak the files for things like text placement,
line thickness, etc., then re-output the files in EPS which Word
handles nicely, except for the low-res preview. Canvas does vector and
bitmap together seemlessly.
M. Katz
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39638 is a reply to message #39637] |
Wed, 02 June 2004 14:57 |
Mark Hadfield
Messages: 783
Registered: May 1995
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Senior Member |
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Kenneth Bowman wrote:
> David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
>>> So, does no-one have joy with windows metafiles?
>>> Or directly through the windows clip-board (OLE, and all that)?
>>
>> You might ask the Mac users. They go in for that sort
>> of thing. :-)
>>
>
> Now that Macs run Unix (OS X), IDL runs under X Windows. If I
> understand the question correctly, its about grabbing images from the
> screen.
The original question was about writing IDL graphics to Windows
Metafiles via the METAFILE device (Direct Graphics) or the
IDLgrClipboard object (Object Graphics). This can only be done on
Windows, because it uses the OS's support for the metafile format.
Yeah, it works quite well. If you generate a WMF file in IDL and import
it into Word, it looks nice on the screen, prints nicely and is scalable
& editable (in principle anyway--the number of elements can be quite
large, which may overwhelm Word's picture editor).
I would like to point out that having an accurate representation of a
complicated graphic in a WYSIWYG word processor is not necessarily a
good thing, because it can make screen redraws very slow. Generally, I
find the EPS+preview approach suits me better. But at least with WMF
graphics you don't get people asking why the graphs look so horrible.
--
Mark Hadfield "Ka puwaha te tai nei, Hoea tatou"
m.hadfield@niwa.co.nz
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39640 is a reply to message #39639] |
Wed, 02 June 2004 14:18 |
K. Bowman
Messages: 330
Registered: May 2000
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Senior Member |
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In article <MPG.1b27c358d6b12d4f989779@news.frii.com>,
David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
>> So, does no-one have joy with windows metafiles?
>> Or directly through the windows clip-board (OLE, and all that)?
>
> You might ask the Mac users. They go in for that sort
> of thing. :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
Now that Macs run Unix (OS X), IDL runs under X Windows. If I
understand the question correctly, its about grabbing images from the
screen.
If you want to copy bitmap graphics from an X window, you can use Grab
or some other screen capture tool. (Grab also grabs the window borders.
Duh.)
I don't bother with screen capture. I either TVREAD and then WRITE_PNG,
or, more commonly, write directly to Postscript.
Ken
P.S. Still hoping (obviously in vain), that they'll add full 24-bit
color support to the PS device driver.
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39648 is a reply to message #39644] |
Wed, 02 June 2004 08:15 |
Paul Van Delst[1]
Messages: 1157
Registered: April 2002
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Senior Member |
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Kristian Kj�r wrote:
> How do people get nice pictures in MS-word files?
Hello,
I produce PostScript files from IDL, then use the unix epstool utility to create an
encapsulated PS file with a low-resolution TIFF preview. I insert the eps file into my
word document. It looks like crap on screen but, like DF mentioned in another post in this
thread, the trick is not to look at the graphics until they've been printed! :o)
>
> To produce text with publication-quality plots in it, the best, surely,
> is to write postscript files from IDL and insert them in LATEX.
>
> However, various constraints mean that often I have to write the text in
> MS-word.
> Then it works to insert eps-files and print on a postscript printer, but
> on the screen you see at best a preview of the graphic.
It really doesn't matter what the graphics look like onscreen in MSWord.
If it's any consolation, I just had a paper accepted at a journal where they *couldn't*
print out MSword docs containing eps graphics with embedded previews! The first time they
brought it up, they mentioned the graphics looked quite crappy (my word). I explained it
all to them and, in the end, just ended up sending larger sized hardcopies to them for
them to take piccies of.
paulv
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39696 is a reply to message #39622] |
Sun, 06 June 2004 02:50 |
R.Bauer
Messages: 1424
Registered: November 1998
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Senior Member |
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Kristian Kjï¿œr wrote:
> Ehr, it's actually more that I want:
> I'd also like to export the plot to my (collegue's) favourite graphics
> program, there to add artistic stuff that you can't easily make in IDL,
> touch up the graph, changing the odd title, etc. (so I'd like the text as
> text, not as curves).
>
> But I guess for that I have chosen the wrong plotting program.
> I'd be glad to be proven wrong, though.
No
You don't know pstoedit.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pstoedit/
http://www.pstoedit.net/
or based on that importsps
http://home.t-online.de/home/helga.glunz/wglunz/importps/ind ex.htm
importps
Importps.dll is a PDF and PostScript import filter for Windows 9X/NT/2K/XP.
This is not a stand-alone program that converts PDF or PostScript to Word
or Powerpoint directly. Instead you can import a single page of a
PostScript or PDF file as graphic "picture" into an opened Office document.
Importps is based on pstoedit and supports the ALDUS (TM) filter interface.
This filter can be used with Office 95/97/2000/XP, Photoline or any other
product that support the ALDUS filter interface to import a single page of
a .ps or .pdf document as an editable (vector) graphic.
Reimar
>
> Thanks, Kristian
>
> Kristian Kjaer wrote:
>
>>>> How do people get nice pictures in MS-word files?
>>>
--
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
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| Re: Publication-quality plots [message #39701 is a reply to message #39613] |
Sat, 05 June 2004 05:29 |
Randall Skelton
Messages: 169
Registered: October 2000
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Senior Member |
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If you are looking for an object graphics solution in IDL, my I suggest
Mark Hadfield's 'Motley' library. The best part of Mark's code, IMHO, are
the examples.
http://www.dfanning.com/hadfield/idl/README.html
It makes very nice object graphics plots. If you use 'export->EPS' you
actually can get very nice publication quality plots. If you must use
word, I recommend using CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator to open the plot
and export it to a windows metafile or a Macintosh PICT file. Copying to
the clipboard is risky because you never know wheter you will get a vector
or bitmap when you paste! Both wmf and pict files are metafiles and can
be used to store vector based drawings. As others have commented, most
publication houses would prefer not to muck with these dodgy formats--
they generally prefer getting raw eps files or camera ready copies.
To weigh in on the ease of use of IDL. One of my all time, favorite
plotting packaged is IGOR by Wavemetrics. I don't use it much these days
because my data volume simply outgrew it (I work with about 1-3GB of
geophysical/engineering data on any given day at the moment). It made
beautiful plots with very little work. One of the best features it had
was the ability to select a graphic object with the mouse and edit it with
a dialog box. Once the edit occured, a line was written to the console,
usually 'ModifyGraph rgb=(65535,0,0) marker=19 noLabel=2' or something
similar. Copying this line into a file allowed you to very quickly create
a script for recreating the plot as it appeared on the screen. In this
way, you never needed to remember the syntax of the ModifyGraph or
SetScale command and instead of burrying your head in massive 4000 page
PDF manual, you could could remind your self with 10 seconds of mouse
work.
Cheers,
Randall
On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Paul Van Delst wrote:
> David Fanning wrote:
>> Paul Van Delst writes:
>>
>>
>>> Maybe it's my level of crotchety-ness increasing with age, but if it takes longer than 5
>>> minutes for me to just *look* at my data, I'm not interested. What with everything else
>>> going on in the world nowadays, the last thing I need is yet another thing to raise the
>>> blood pressure. :o)
>>
>>
>> Maybe you should give tennis a try. :-)
>
> Like I said, the last thing I need....... :oD
>
> Squash is my racquet/ball game. All those walls to stop the little black ball going "out"
> are a good thing.
>
> paulv
>
> p.s. Congratulations on your rediscovered joy of tourney tennis.
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