Re: [Plplot-general] PS Driver for Image Plots

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2004-11-14 15:17-0700 Curtis Cooper wrote:

> Firstly, many thanks for PLplot!  I will acknowledge my usage of your
> program at the end of the research article I am currently working on.

Thanks for those kind words and also the formal research acknowledgement.

>
> In any case, I am having a bit of trouble with a couple of areas of PLplot
> usage:
>
> 1) Does the Freetype font interface work with Python yet?  Are there any
> examples of how to implement this?

It works for python just as well as for C. :-)

There are several freetype issues that are _not_ dependent on the interface
language.

(a) Only implemented on gd-related devices (png, jpeg, gif).

(b) We currently do not access the complete range of font indices.  We
are currently limited to the first 200 or so characters.

(c) Once we get access to the complete range we need a more human-usable
way to specify the characters for special symbols.

(b) and (c) both substantially limit the use of symbol fonts. There have
been plenty of technical discussions to get (b) and (c) straightened out,
and I believe it is only a matter of coding now.  If you want to give the
freetype approach a spin, read src/plfreetype.c for documentation about the
environment variables you have to set, and drivers/gd.c for the driver
options you have to set to access ordinary character fonts.  I have found,
that ordinary character results look quite good with device png, for
example.  Thus, it looks like this approach has outstanding potential for
publication-quality plots with a full-range of scientific symbols, but we
are not there yet because of issues (b) and (c).

> 2) Image plots using the postscript driver come out with streaks across
> the image, as can be seen by running example x16c and saving to a
> postscript driver (either ps or psc).

What platform and what version of PLplot?  I have never seen such problems
with example 16 on Linux.

> 3) Finally, I'd like to use the pstex driver, but the Latex files it
> creates don't compile on my version of Latex.

This donated code is considered experimental, and nobody has yet stepped
forward to maintain/document it.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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