Re: small graphics in Ferret

[Steve Hankin <Steven.C.Hankin@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mark,

A few points:
 

• For small-area plots you may want to reduce the amount of white space used around the borders of the plot ... in extreme cases reducing this to zero and locating the axis tics, etc, *inside* of the plotting rectangle.  There is a script, "GO borders" that can do this for you.
• Ferret uses PLOT+ fonts, which are not the nicest.  For publication graphics some folks like to output the graphics unlabelled and add the labeling with another application.
• I'm not sure of the issues that you refer to with colors "blurring" together ... 300x300 pixels will impose the same limitations on colors regardless of the application.  You can experiment with different palettes to find what works for you.

    - steve

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Mark Carson wrote:

Hello!

I'm trying to build some graphs for publication, and so far Ferret has
not produced graphics (shade plots, mostly) that scale well or can scale
to be small enough.  The fonts seem to get crunched too much as well as
the colors start to blur together somewhat.  I need for the graphics to
be not much larger than 3 inches printed (maybe about 300x300 pixels on
screen).  Are there any tricks to get Ferret to produce clean graphics
at that size?  I've tried the frame command with the window sized to the
right dimensions and also tried a larger window that I used graphics
software to scale it down after "framing" it.  I just wish they weren't
gif files.  If Matlab is the better answer, let me know because I
already have some ideas on that front too.  But Ferret is faster at
generating the graphs without so much programming.

Thanks!

Mark Carson
OCRD / PMEL