| 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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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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