Re: thumbnails

[nobody(at)nowhere.com (steve)]

On Tue, 06 Mar 2001 17:50:59 GMT, Mike Chinander <mchinand@midway.uchicago.edu> 
wrote:
>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)

that was helpful, Mike, thanks. I looked at xfig and pstoedit, it will be 
useful in the future for me. However, as I used vector-drawn fonts in most
of the figures (too lazy to us psfonts, usually they change the drawing area)
importing into xfig the vector fonts are inumerable line-segments that seems
a waste of time to go and delete-edit on a character by character basis. If
I had used ps-fonts, this might have been easier. I was hoping to script the
whole job, which looks like it could be done, but the forementioned weakness
makes me think I'll just bag it. I find converting to pdf format and using 
acrobat might be the best solution, unlike MS-powerpoint (or even Sun-Star
Office), it renders the pdf-from-ps pretty well. I'm going to use the ps2psf
command line on my linux system. pstoedit web-page says that one weakness of
pstoedit is that it bit-maps all but a select set of standard postscript
fonts. If I had a nickel for every font problem I've encountered over the
years !!!!.....


-- 
Steve S.

yubdub
steve@CLOTHESmailaps.org
remove CLOTHES before replying