Re: [Plplot-general] plplot creates large ps files?

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

On 2005-03-17 12:37+0800 Valery Pipin wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I'm trying to create shadowed (in grey level) countour plots. The produced ps
> file for relatively simple figure (the Maunder - like diagramms  for rotation
> and magnetic field  variations of the Sun) is huge ~ 30mb. Why it is so huge?
> There is a strange thing about it, when I take this huge file in gimp and save
> it in ps format. The obtained file will be only 40kb! The quality of shadows
> remains good. However, things like captions and etc. getting worse in this
> case. I feel there is some trick in creating shadowed plots with plplot.
>

Hi Valery:

30MB does seem excessive. I suggest you compare the number of x and y points
and the number of contours of your plot with what is done for example 16.
That has 5 pages of different shade plots, and it only takes 1.8MB total or
0.36MB per page.

Beyond that, I understand there are ways to transform shade information for
postscript so that it gives about the same look.  This is alluded to in the
Los Alamos preprint server documentation where they discuss ways of making
postscript plots substantially smaller, but I have never followed up that
possibility for the PLplot postscript device.

Perhaps the gimp does such a transformation.  Note, we will shortly be doing
a development release of PLplot which includes improved handling of
non-Hershey fonts, e.g., postscript fonts for the postscript device. Those
fonts may survive the gimp transformation perfectly.

Watch here for the announcement.

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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