Re: thumbnails

[mchinand(at)midway.uchicago.edu (Mike Chinander)]

In article <MPG.150ed0047c674e33989d7f@news.frii.com>,
David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
>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

What I have used to do this is convert the eps file with pstoedit to the
.fig format and then edit this file (change linethickness, fontsize, add a
background, etc) with xfig.  After doing that you can save (and scale) it
to a variety of graphics formats.  I find this very useful for converting
plots that I have saved in eps format and then sometime later need to
convert it to jpeg or some other format suitable for inclusion in
Powerpoint.

--Mike Chinander
-- 
-- 
Michael Chinander                                  University of Chicago
m-chinander@uchicago.edu    (773)834-5101 (Voice)    (773)702-0371 (Fax)