Re: plots for printing

[Martin Schultz <martin.schultz(at)dkrz.de>]

"Dominik Paul" <dpaul@ukl.uni-freiburg.de> writes:

> Hello there,
> 
> I need some plots for my report. And I made these plots with IDL (very good
> programm for visualisation). Than I take screen shots of the pictures and
> used it for printing.
> 
> The result was a wuite bad quality. Does somebody know, how I could do this
> in a better way to get a good resolution for printing (maybe 300 dpi)?
> 
> Thanks for your help
> 
> Dom
> 
> --
> ====================================
> Dominik Paul
> Uniklinik Freiburg
> Abt. Nuklearmedizin/PET
> ====================================
> 
> 

For printing, I can only agree to what the others said: use the 'PS' 
device for best results (often looks nicer to use PS or Truetype fonts,
too). However, if you want to be really en vogue and embed an IDL plot 
in a Powerpoint or StarImpress (or ...) presentation, you have no way 
but get a screen snapshot (e.g. with David's TVRD() program). This 
gives horrible quality! The quality can be improved substantially,
however, if you produce the plot in a pixmap window that is at least
twice as large (along each side) as the desired final image size. Then
you read and save this screen, and afterwards you use some graphics 
program (ImageMagick, Corel Photopaint, Photoshop, ...) to resize 
the image. I tried this with Imagemagick and various graphics formats 
and achieved good results only with jpg (downsizing produces anti-aliasing
-- with png it doesn't).

    In principal, IDL should already have the tools built-in to do
the downsizing with anti-aliasing, but in the short time we tried this,
we couldn't get it to work. Maybe it's time for a feature request?

Best regards,

Martin


-- 
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[[ Dr. Martin Schultz   Max-Planck-Institut fuer Meteorologie    [[
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