1) Can I assume that we are talking about the results of Fprint, not gif output? Of course the gif plots made by FRAME are for screen viewing only and are not publication quality. No one should use gif plots for publication.
2) The biggest problem I see with the postscript => pdf output of Fprint is that single-width lines are too thin for publications, either fonts or plot lines. There have been several contributions to this list that fix that problem, including most recently Ryo Furue's script last week (http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/maillists/tmap/ferret_users/fu_2010/msg00155.html ). I think others (Wittenberg?) have posted nice solutions for this as well (search "thicken lines"). These are easy-to-use unix scripts that thicken the lines in the postscript output of Fprint. Unless you are writing large amounts of text on a plot, using a duplex Ferret font (e.g. DR, or CR if you like serifs), and then running one of these simple scripts on the postscript output will generally produce plot labels that look as good as anything seen in AMS pubs. (One man's opinion ... as I said before, the clean and readable appearance of Ferret plots is a big reason I keep using Ferret, compared to the "competition").
3) The limitation of Ferret fonts is primarily that they are fixed width, not kerned. No doubt, kerned fonts are better for long blocks of text. Is that the issue here? It seems to me that a very large fraction of publication plots do not (and usually should not) have long blocks of text. Those few plots that do need this can be tweaked in Illustrator.
Billy K On Mar 3, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Steve Hankin wrote:
Gustafson, William I wrote:We (at last) have some additional support for Ferret to begin in a couple of months. The topic of improving publication-quality graphics is *definitely* on the list.This issue has come up before on this discussion group. Unfortunately, my impression is that the graphics core used by Ferret cannot handle postscript or other "pretty" fonts. This is my biggest complaint with Ferret, although I don't let it stop me from using Ferret. I find it faster to clean up the fonts later in Illustrator than to go through the trouble of writing several hundred lines of code in NCL or IDL when Ferret can do the same thing in a dozen. In reality, I have gotten lazier as I age and value my time more than the prettiness of my graphics and often forgo the effort I used to put into making them "perfect".If the Ferret developers could ever get postscript fonts, or at least something like Helvetica, into Ferret, I could convert a lot more folks in my group to use it.thanks - Steve-Bill ___________________________________________ William I. Gustafson Jr., Ph.D. Scientist ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES AND GLOBAL CHANGE DIVISION Pacific Northwest National Laboratory P.O. 999, MSIN K9-30 Richland, WA 99352 Tel: 509-372-6110 William.Gustafson@xxxxxxx http://www.pnl.gov/atmospheric/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=5716On 3/1/10 2:22 PM, "William S. Kessler" <william.s.kessler@xxxxxxxx> wrote:Interesting. One of the important reasons I use Ferret is because theplots (including fonts) are better-looking than other plotting packages.But if you don't like the Ferret fonts, then I think you are out of luck. You would have to replace them in an external program (Adobe Illustrator). Billy K On Mar 1, 2010, at 12:53 PM, Praveen V K wrote:Greetings to all, Is there any way to get publication quality fonts in Ferret as in other famous plotting applications? I tried most of the fonts available for ferret, but none of them is not as good as others. ------------------------------------------------------------- Praveen V K