Re: PostScript and IDL,

[root <root(at)tesla.drcmr.dk>]

>  Lars Hanson (larsh@magnet.drcmr.dk) writes:
> Hi, I'm having problems with PostScript generated by IDL...blah,blah

Thanks for good advice and interesting discusions on the subject.

David Fanning writes:
> Dick and I have been kicking around the idea of writing a class
> library of direct graphics objects that we could offer for
> sale. But unfortunately, it appears to be a shrinking 
> market....

I'd certainly prefer to buy a package of routines, rather than a new
disk for my too-large-to-handle-anyway plots. In this case, however, I
think it is a problem for RSI to solve -- "screen-dumps are rarely
suitable for publication" (Craig B. Markwardt). Fortunately now RSI
seems to think so too.

David Fanning writes:
>   The big issue for us is what tradeoffs are users willing
>   to make in order to get scalable PostScript output.

I don't quite see why we need the tradeoffs. Is there a reason not to
mix PostScript primitives and bitmaps in the same PS file? After all
some graphics are well represented by bitmaps (e.g. bitmaps). Objects
just need to be aware of the best way to print themselves.

Martin Schultz <mgs@io.harvard.edu> writes:

>  E.g. I make a plot of some preliminary data, and of course it is nice
> to optimize this plot with the help of a few mouse clicks, i.e. in
> object graphics. But then I want to reproduce the exact same plot with
> the final data that comes in a few weeks/months later

For this reason, I used to generate plots of my IDL data by writing
data to an appropriate XMGR template (good and free plotting program
(isn't it free??  (If not, I'm really contributing to the "Free
Advice" thread in a bad way)). XMGR then produces editable, saveable
and printable graphs, much like we wan't IDL to do. (I'll send an
example IDL procedure if anyone cares, but there is nothing to it).

I used to think that this was a bad solution, but it seems that for
the moment, this is better than I thought (because other solutions are
worse). Problem is that XMGR doesn't handle images well.

Thanks, Lars
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larsh@magnet.drcmr.dk