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

[Valery P. <pi...@is...>]

On Thursday 17 March 2005 14:50, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> 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.
Thanks, for idea. I'm an idiot. The number of points was too excessive for the 
averaged picture. 
>
> 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.
Thanks to plplot team for the exelent job!
>
> Watch here for the announcement.
Looking forward,
Valery