| 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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