Re: [Matplotlib-users] printing quality

[Michael D. <md...@st...>]

Peter I. Hansen wrote:
> On Nov 30, 2007 4:58 PM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:
>> Peter I. Hansen wrote:
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I'm typestting some graphs including a few axvspan's with eg. a
>>> facecolor='0.6' . This looks very nice if I output a PNG, but when I
>>> inculde this in my TeX document the axis labels dosn't scale. Then I
>>> try to go the postscript way, and the the labels scale nicely but the
>>> colored fields of axvspan prints as a coarse raster color.
>> I assume you mean that the axvspan prints as a solid color, rather than
>> semi-transparent (alpha-blended).  That is an unfortunate limitation of
>> the Postscript format -- it can not handle transparency.
> 
> Yes, I'm using a solid color.
> 
>>> Is there a best way of optimizing print quality?
>> Each of the output formats has a number of different limitations -- it
>> depends a lot on what you're rendering and where you need it to go.
>>
>> You could try saving as a PDF, and then using pdftex to generate your
>> document, if that's an option for you.
> 
> Unfortunately, saving directly as PDF does not work on my (Debian)
> system. It gives a "NotImplementedError". I'm using version 0.90.1,
> and maybe this will change for 0.91 .

Can you please send the full traceback that accompanies this error?  PDF 
should be working is general, but perhaps you are running into a 
specific feature of the PDF backend that is not working, and there may 
be a workaround (or 0.91 may work)...

Cheers,
Mike

-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA