| Re: IDL's EPS thumbnail image [message #4846 is a reply to message #4752] |
Thu, 03 August 1995 00:00   |
Troy Klein
Messages: 4
Registered: April 1995
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Junior Member |
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Here's some additional info about using IDL's EPS output.
By using the packages described my previous reply/post you can create a plain
postscript file with IDL, process it with the software in the packages, ftp the
result to a Mac or PC, and then paste/import the resulting EPSF file into your
Mac/PC application of choice that recognizes EPSF files.
This allows you to:
1) view a low resolution image of the IDL postscript in your application
2) easily add annotation to the IDL graphics
3) cover up any unwanted part of the IDL graphics
4) print with the same resolution as the orginal postscript
5) keep all your IDL graphics together in a single document
6) easily find and reuse IDL graphics if needed
This is how I do all my IDL graphics now. Rather than mess with all the
graphical formatting keywords and options in IDL, I simply use it to get the
basic graph or image into postscript and then I add most of the annotation with
Powerpoint or MacDraw Pro on a Macintosh. This allows you to interactively
add/modify the annotation without having to reproduce the IDL graphics over and
over again. In fact I can do all of this on my HP 735 with MAE (Macintosh
Application Environment) from Apple. MAE is essentially MacOS that runs in an
X window. If you have access to the World Wide Web check out
http://www.mae.apple.com/.
Once the IDL graphics is in a document, I can print selected pages or copy and
paste them into other documents. You can even scale the graphics if you wish.
You can mix the graphics into a report or into presentation slides.
Now about the packages. I think the best way to track down the Mac packages
right now is at the Web page http://vsl.cnet.com/cgi-bin/shase. This page
allows you to search the software archives for various platforms by filename or
description. If you don't have Web access, then the packages can be ftp'd from
a mirror of the umi-mac archive, mirror.aol.com in the directories
/pub/mac/util/text/ and /pub/mac/util/unix/. The PC package unfortunately
doesn't turn up in the archive search, so you have to turn to Archie. A good
Archie Web interface that I use is at http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/archie.html.
One of the places it found ps2epsf is at ftp.cs.orst.edu in the directory
/localsrc/graphics.
Even though I haven't personally tried the PC package ps2epsf, I expect it to
work as well as the Mac packages because the Mac packages were derived from
ps2epsf. The difference between the Mac packages is ps2epsmac was written for
UNIX and ps2epsplus was compiled for Mac. ps2epsplus is nice because it has a
friendly Mac interface, however if you have a 6 year old Mac like me, it going
to run fairly slow. That's why I use ps2epsmac. If you have some complicated
IDL graphics (contour plots, surface plots and images for example) it could
mean minutes on the Mac instead of seconds on a UNIX box.
A couple notes:
The documentation for ps2epsmac claims that the color preview has 8 bit
resolution. For my particular setup I have found this to not be the case, it's
more like 3 or 4 bits. As it turns out I think this better because the file is
smaller, yet I still get enough different colors to figure out what is what in
the picture. Also I had to modify the main shell script file to get a fitted
bounding box around the graphics and a color preview at the same time. You can
get a color preview with the original script but must stick with the orignal
bounding box in the postscript file.
Hope this info helps you produce some really nice looking IDL output. Troy.
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