Re: thumbnails

[davidf(at)dfanning.com (David Fanning)]

steve (nobody@nowhere.com) writes:

> As I suspected, thanks for confirming that. As long as I'm talking to a 
> guru: is there an image format I can use that will display nice in say,
> powerpoint, and also produce nice postscript output? I write all my 
> routines to display to my X display (in Linux) and then I switch to the
> PS device and send everything to a .ps file, making some minor adjustments
> for special cases (like bitmapped images mixed with line-art). This makes
> very nice postcript output, but now I'm trying to fix what should not 
> need to be fixed: I'm taking a scalable format (postscript) and producing
> a non-scalable thumbnail (bitmap) for display. I don't want to just dump
> my X display to a bitmap format like tiff, gif, jpeg. Since I'm using a
> *nix-like system, is there something else I should be doing? I'm a little
> afraid of things like Windows Meta File, since Win-xx usually makes postscript
> a real chore, and actually, I don't see it in my IDL help. Any suggestions?

You might try something like CGM output. Some
software is able to read and display those
files nicely. I've never used it myself.

I tend to use JPEG files for nearly everything.
Sometimes if I need great looking viewgraphs
I'll do the "scale everything by 4" trick that
I have talked about previously in this newsgroup. 
I use the Z-buffer at 4x resolution, use true-type
fonts, set all thickness, character sizes, etc to
4x. Take a snapshot, reduce the image by 4x, and
make a JPEG file out of that. It produces some
lovely viewgraphs...sometimes. :-)

I'm not sure you are going to have your cake and
eat it too with IDL. (Or with your computer, for
that matter. The only computer I know of that was
fabulous at showing great looking preview images
was the Next computer using Display PostScript as
it's rendering language.)

Cheers,

David

-- 
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting
Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
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