| Re: How to print from an iTool? In color. [message #60866] |
Wed, 18 June 2008 07:20 |
Kenneth P. Bowman
Messages: 585
Registered: May 2000
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Senior Member |
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In article <g39dkh$m7m$1@news.nems.noaa.gov>,
Paul van Delst <Paul.vanDelst@noaa.gov> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My previous post today to this newsgroup showed me suffering from an M.C.Escher-like
> brainfade, and I hope it's happening in this case too.
>
> How on earth does one print to a local printer, in color, from an iTool? In this case,
> iSurface?
>
> I keep getting this xprinter thingo that lists a bzillion different printers EXCEPT the
> one I have. Printing to a file is the obvious answer (the xprinter.eps) but there's no color.
>
> And the quality of the PS output that I can get in xprinter.eps is deplorable (all
> pixel-y). And it appears the plots to file are all bitmaps by default (and even when I
> specifically set the eps to be vector, I still get bitmaps in the file). I need the usual
> vector output so I can edit the PS file directly, changing the scale, bounding box, etc.
> You know, like I can do with direct graphics output.
>
> So, I *must* be doing a number of things *very* wrong.
>
> Does anyone have an online "dummy's guide" for getting this working for itools? The IDL
> documentation was...um...well, suffice it to say I ended up visiting DF's website. There I
> saw a bunch of stuff involving dialog_printersetup() and whatnot, but nothing particularly
> iTool-y related.
>
> Am I having a really bad day, or is the iTool printer output interface ridiculously
> complicated?
>
> cheers,
>
> paulv
Hi Paul,
I struggled with this for a long time myself. The (non-obvious) solution is to
use the Export command on the File menu to export to a file. You can pick your
format (various bitmapped image file types or EPS). Note that EPS does not support some
of the graphics capabilities of the iTools, such as texture maps. For simple
graphics it works pretty well.
If your iTool uses more complex graphic functions, the solution appears to be to make
a *really* big window in order to get as many pixels as possible. A very large display
helps. :-)
If you want to export graphics programmatically from an iTool, you can try my
ITOOL_WRITE_GRAPHIC_KPB procedure, which is in bowman_lib, available on my
downloads page
http://idl.tamu.edu/Downloads.html
Cheers, Ken
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