postscript
- To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
- Subject: postscript
- From: tuk at natazhat.uafphys.alaska.edu (John Pender)
- Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 12:09:20 YST
hiya folks- i have a proposal that some of you might consider and comment on. mathsource is a very nice source of all kinds of applications of mathematica, but the format isn't all that convenient for normal unix users. i'm referring in particular to those of us who would like to be able to view a particularly nice plot or, especially, a series of plots linked together as an animation which someone has donated to the archives. the "unix" format supplied in mathsource is a file called file.tar.Z, which certainly can be read over using anonymous ftp. unfortunately, more often than not this "unix" file is actually in notebook format. one can use the appropriate version of nb2tex to produce a tex document, but that doesn't allow one to load in images and view an animation. there is a couple of ways a unix user can view someone else's pictures (besides generating them all over again). both require that the image be stored in mathematica's own special version of postscript. a file in this format can be read into a mathematica session or it can be displayed on the screen using one of the utilities mathematica supplies (x11ps, motifps, sunps, etc). the problem is that all images imbedded in a notebook are in encapsulated postscript format, which can't be read either by mathematica or by any of the utilities. would it really be that big a deal to store an image or a series of images in the archive in the mathematica-compatible postscript format in a compressed tar file? am i the only one who wishes he could take a look at the movies? john pender