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Hi Goran, I will make a few comments, but I also hope that others in this list who have experience using Ferret to make plots for publication will add their suggestions. The metafiles can get big, as they are ASCII files with all of the commands specifying graphics settings and each plot element as it is added to the plot. The postscript files generated with gksm2ps are also ASCII with a similar amount of information. If your plot has several overlays then all the information used to plot each layer is in these files. A gif image is smaller, as it contains only the color flag for each pixel in the final plot. So it is not surprising that metafiles and postscript files are bigger than gif files, though I agree that 92 mb is big! The batch postscript mode makes graphics calls to write postscript directly from the GKS graphics software, so it does not contain the same postscript commands, so the ideas in the FAQ, How can I control line thickness when I translate a metafile to a postscript file? do not apply to postscript generated from the batch mode of Ferret. Did you try at the TR font in Ferret? It is somewhat thicker and may have a better appearance. Also making the text bigger helps. If these don't give you an acceptable output I wonder if a solution might be to create your final plot as a gif or postscript in batch mode but without the text, and then adding the labels using a separate graphics program. Does anyone have suggestions for tools Goran might use? Ansley Goran Georgievski wrote: 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... |