publication quality plots?

[Goran Georgievski <goran@xxxxxxx>]

Hello All,

According to instructions found in FAQ (How can I make publication-quality 
Polar Stereographic Plots? and other) I have produced some figures but I have 
some problems with outputing to postscript file.
I try to produce publication quality ps file on several different ways but 
none of them seem to be satisfying. I describe them and ask for your 
suggestion to complete the task: produce the publication quality plot!

1. I try to produce metafile since I am changing aspect ratio this is 
recommended method to produce the ps file. Featuring metafile is about 92 MB 
(!) and when I try to produce the ps file on the machine with low memory 
resources it chrasehs befor producing ps file completly. On the machine with 
1 GB memory it produces blured and patchy ps file about 72 MB in size.

(!) Additional note is that I do not use so extremly large data set and I 
really do not know why output file should be so huge. For producing a plot I 
have used about 5 files (topography, masks, and various data) with 352x160 
matrix size (only one vertical level) and with 22 time steps. I was also 
using geo_borders_intermed.nc file for puting coastlines and rievrs on the 
plot. 

2. I try to output the plot to the gif file. Featuring gif file is  94 KB in 
size and it looks ok, except numbers used by shade key and coordinate axis 
values. I try to change the font but this is the first time that I realized 
that all the fonts available in ferret does not look good. Even if you look 
at the picture available at the 
http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/Ferret/FAQ/custom_plots/polar_stereographic.html    
you will see that for example C looks like eaten.

3. I try to aquire screenshoot with the gimp, but this is obviously pointless 
since output on the scree from ferret is not correct.

4. Finnaly I produced postscript in the batch mode (I have to quit changing 
the window size). It is 69 MB in size but fonts are not good as before. I try 
to change the ps file as decribed in FAQ (Changing line thickness in 
PostScript files) but greping the ps file it turns out that there is no line 
         3000 div setlinewidth
but
/w {setlinewidth} bind def  
and I do not know anything about postscript and what to do with that.
However converting with ps2pdf pdf file is about 13 MB and everything looks 
great (even numbers and not only on the screen but hard copy too). But for 
some reason I need to have postscript file. Trying to covert pdf with gimp to 
ps did not give the result.

My question is:How can I really produce publication quality plot with the 
ferret when all the fonts seem to have bad apearence even on the screen? 

Additional question perhaps does not belong to this list but if someone could 
satisfy my curiosity I would be thankful:
I would also like to know why pdf file is smaller but of better quality than 
ps, or how is it posible at all to produce correct pdf file from bad ps file? 

I am using ferret version 5.51, 5.53, and 5.6 on various Linux boxes (built 
with g77/gcc v2.96).

Thanks for your support,
Goran


Ps: I do not really feel comfortable with the idea to switch to another 
visualisation tool...


-- 
Goran Georgievski
ICBM, Physical Oceanography (Theory)
University of Oldenburg
Postfach 2503, D-26111 Oldenburg, Germany
Tel: ++49 (0)441 798 4061; Fax: ++49 (0)441 798 3404