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Re: "At long last, Sir, have you no shame?"

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg18683] Re: [mg18259] "At long last, Sir, have you no shame?"
  • From: Mike Trefry <mike.trefry at per.clw.csiro.au>
  • Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 01:46:01 -0400
  • Organization: C.S.I.R.O Australia
  • References: <7l3mbi$g9i@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Guys,

This issue of publication quality graphics bugs a lot of people. I have had
several years of Mac experience with Mathematica (on v2.2) and 18 months Windows
experience on v3.0, preparing figures for reports and journal papers on both
platforms. The very worst way to do it is to cut and paste graphics from
Mathematica into your word processor, especially MS Word. And, despite various
people's protestations to the contrary, Mathematica doesn't cut it as a flexible
publication authoring package!

The way that works for me is to rough out figures in Mathematica and export them
as EPS. Then I import them into a proper graphics package, like Corel Draw or
Quark, using a PostScript interpreter. The figures are touched up there to
presentation quality before being exported again as EPS, with TIFF, PICT or WMF
headers. These are then imported into the word processor file, e.g. "Insert
Picture". This is more time consuming than it should be, but the results are
first rate. You can even capture the usual Mathematica cludges with Math1
brackets that aren't written correctly etc etc. In my experience, using any
other graphics format than EPS for transporting figures will ultimately cause
grief.

Mike Trefry
CSIRO Land and Water
Australia



"Mark E. Harder" wrote:

> Andrew;
>     I hear ya.  What I want from Mathematica is a rapid method for
> simulation and analysis.  Because of bugs and the time required to
> learn to prepare publication- or even presentation-quality plots of
> scientific data in Mathematica., I prefer to put Mathematica results
> into Excel & use its built-in 2-D graphics.  I use the 'Mathematica
> Link for Microsoft Excel' add-on to transfer Mathematica. arrays into
> Excel, then use then use the latter's Graphics Wizard to create color
> plots from ranges of data.  For better-quality graphics (for printing,
> or publication) I like the graphics produced by 'Origin' from Microcal,
> which will read Mathematica. matrices in Mathematica. format with
> little fuss.  So, unless you are writing a user-friendly Mathematica.
> package or add-on, or some such, I suggest using Mathematica. up to the
> output stage of your analyses, which i assume are the parts you are
> happy with so far, and let other programs take care of graphics.
> -mark harder
> p.s.  Oops!  I use a Windows NT system, not a Mac.  Hopefully you can find
> Mac graphics programs to do the same things.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Watson <abwatson at mail.arc.nasa.gov>
To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
> Subject: [mg18683] [mg18259] "At long last, Sir, have you no shame?"
>
> >Saying first that I am a fanatical Mathematica user, in awe of the product
> >and its developers, I nonetheless feel compelled to say that...
> >
> >I am absolutely astonished that Mathematica 4.0 has *still* not fixed the
> >FrameLabel rotated text bug, which prevents vertical axis labels from
> >appearing properly when rendered on screen on the Mac. This bug causes
> >endless troubles for those of us who prepare figures for both printing and
> >live presentation. This bug has been present since time immemorial, but
> >elicits only sheepish chuckles from Wolfram developers when mentioned. What
> >gives? Is this really something that has stumped the greatest computational
> >minds of the end of the millenium? Is it really so low on the list of
> >priorities that it has persisted for 10 years? Have you no shame?
> >
> >Andrew B. Watson
> >MS 262-2
> >NASA Ames Research Center
> >Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000
> >(650) 604-5419 (650) 604-0255 fax
> >abwatson at mail.arc.nasa.gov http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/
> >



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