High Quality Image Hardcopy

tim wrote on May 02, 1999

other possibilities for making decent quality images with coordinates
annotated are AIPS or PGPLOT.  AIPS lets you use real postscript fonts
which look nice, but has some limitations on how they get scaled.  it
also does RA and Dec by default if the image has WCS headers in it. 
look through the journals for radio astronomy posters and you're sure to
see bunches of AIPS produced plots.

PGPLOT does a decent job and is what i use mostly.  the trick is to get
the FITS images to it.  one way would be to use it in conjunction with
CDL.  the way i do it, though, is to use the PDL module
(http://pdl.perl.org) for perl which lets you rfits images into perl
scripts and then display them using ximtool or PGPLOT.  PDL/PGPLOT/perl
is a particularly slick way to plot up bunches of images since once you
figure out how to do one, you can loop through the rest.  PGPLOT's
default fonts look nice, if unexciting.  they are scalable and thus
don't show any pixelation.  my main gripe about PGPLOT is that the
postscript it produces is not grokked by aastex/latex 2.09 and i have to
process the postscript through xfig/transfig to get the bounding box in
the place latex wants it.  latex2e doesn't have that problem.

for interactive annotation like labeling of objects and stuff, i prefer
using xfig.  it's easier and quicker than gimp, if clunkier and less
powerful.  i just find it easier to manipulate objects rather than
layers. 

hope this helps,
tim

-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Tim Pickering                 |     Kapteyn Institute, Postbus 800 
|  
|  tim@astro.rug.nl              | 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands  |
|  http://www.astro.rug.nl/~tim/ |                    +31-50-363-6519  |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Dyslexics have more fnu.

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Jin-chung Hsu wrote on May 03, 1999

spent about 100 min.

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Last post on May 03, 1999