Line thickness in postscript output

[Billy Kessler <William.S.Kessler@xxxxxxxx>]

Many people have commented that the line weights in the postscript output 
from Fprint are very thin, and don't necessarily print well in journals. 
Using thick lines (plot/line=[7 to 18]) is very effective for screen viewing, 
but does not translate into equivalently thick lines in postscript.

The reason for this is that Fprint makes lines 1-6 with postscript line 
weight 1, lines 7-12 weight 2 and lines 13-18 weight 3. But weights 2 and 3 
are only slightly thicker than weight 1.

Below is a (unix) script that will fix this. Use it after making a plot, 
using any of the Ferret lines 1-18. Recall that to make a postscript 
metafile, you must:

yes? set mode meta  ! set only once; cancel with "can mode meta"
yes? plot ....
yes? ppl clsplt     ! close the metafile

This will produce a file metafile.plt. Then make postscript:

> Fprint -o my_filename.ps metafile.plt   

(use the Fprint options "-l cps" for color, "-l ps" for b/w solid and dashed 
lines)

Now, create an executable file (suppose you call it "fix-line-wt") containing 
the code:
----------------------------------------------------------------
# script to increase line weights of Ferret output
sed 's_3.000000 lw_6.000000 lw_g' < $1.ps >! foo; \mv foo $1.ps
sed 's_2.000000 lw_4.000000 lw_g' < $1.ps >! foo; \mv foo $1.ps
sed 's_1.000000 lw_2.000000 lw_g' < $1.ps >! foo; \mv foo $1.ps
----------------------------------------------------------------

Then:

> fix-line-wt my_filename

The result will overwrite my_filename.ps, having doubled the thickness of all 
the lines.

An alternative is to edit the postscript directly. It is actually easy. 
Postscript line weight changes are given by commands of the form:

1.000000 lw    ! indicates line weight 1 (ferret lines 1-6)

(Try "grep lw my_filename.ps"). Just edit the number. No big deal. I find 
that the doubling produced by the above script is a pretty good adjustment, 
but you can make lines of any thickness this way.

And it's always a good idea to remove those metafiles once you've used them! 
They can get pretty big!

Billy K