New user comments & questions

["Donald S. Dunbar" <dsd@xxxxxxx>]

Having very recently set ferret up on my Sun Sparc 20, and having looked
through much of the documentation and tried several examples, two
remarks come immediately to mind:

1. Ferret seems to be well-designed and provides many powerful and
useful features.

2. There seems to be one glaring omission: the ability to draw arbitrary
polygons (e.g., coastlines, grid overlays, etc.).

Can I possibly be correct about #2?  It would be extremely useful to be
able to draw and fill coastlines on maps like the GMT package does.  My
limited experience with GMT suggests that ferret is easier to use and
provides more powerful data manipulation; however GMT has tremendous map
projection and plotting capabilities, and comes with a high resolution
coastline.  As far as I can tell, ferret draws coastlines by contouring
bathymetry.  My applications tend to concern regions covering a few tens
of km; hence etopo5 has insufficient resolution.  Often detailed
bathymetry is unavailable.  I suppose I could generate a synthetic
bathymetry from GMT coastlines (e.g., 0=land, 1=water) on a very fine
grid then contour it, but this seems to be missing the point that ferret
would benefit from being able to draw arbitrary inputed polygons and
fill them.  What I'd really like to be able to do is use GMT coastlines
directly, or extract part of a coastline and include it in a ferret
session.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and ferret already does this.  Please let me know how
other users handle this problem.  Thanks.

Are there any other users who've tried both ferret and GMT and have any
useful comments on their relative merits?
-- 
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D.S. Dunbar (dsd@oar.com)  Ocean Applied Research Ltd.
1864 Duchess Ave.  West Vancouver BC  V7V 1R1  CANADA
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