RE: publication quality plots?

["Gustafson, William I" <william.gustafson@xxxxxxx>]

Adding (or replacing) the text with a program like Adobe Illustrator can improve the plots tremendously. For important plots, I typically create them as postscript in Ferret and then touch-up the text, move around the color bar, etc. in Illustrator. The downside of this is that it can be a bit time consuming. If I had the ability to change things in Ferret, one of them would be to output true postscript font text. One of the few points where I give NCAR Graphics credit is its ability to do this. All the code necessary to get any output is its downside. :-) Overall, Ferret wins hands down as my favorite graphics program because of its breadth of capabilities and ease of use.

-Bill
_____________________________
William I. Gustafson Jr., Ph.D.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
P.O. Box 999, MSIN K9-30
Richland, WA 99352, USA
Voice & Msg: (509)372-6110
http://www.pnl.gov/atmos_sciences


> ----------
> From: 	owner-ferret_users@pmel.noaa.gov on behalf of Ansley Manke
> Sent: 	Thursday, July 29, 2004 2:13 PM
> To: 	Goran Georgievski
> Cc: 	ferret_users@noaa.gov
> Subject: 	Re: publication quality plots?
> 
> 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...
> 
> 
> 	  
> 
>