Graphics Output (publication quality) from Mathematica?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg4646] Graphics Output (publication quality) from Mathematica?
- From: siegman at ee.stanford.edu (AES)
- Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 03:55:02 -0400
- Organization: Stanford University
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
I have some general questions about graphical output from Mathematica. Like a number of other people, I greatly admire the plotting (or graphing) capabilities of Mathematica for displaying the results of numerical calculations quickly and easily, but struggle to get publication quality output with added annotations and labels, changed line weights, etc., from the mma screen displays. I find the mma tools for adding annotations to plots, changing fonts, etc., very cumbersome and difficult to learn. My solution thus far, which I believe other people do also, is to Copy the graphic to the clipboard (this is on a Mac); Convert Clipboard to EPSF; and save as a file. I can then open this file and add text annotations, change line weights, etc. in any of a number of graphics program (e.g., SuperPaint or Illustrator). I also find that the saved EPSF file prints nicely at any scale in TeX using the \special command to input the graphic into Textures, though the on-screen display in Textures is sometimes jaggy. One gimmick in this is that I find that if I shrink the initial on-screen display down to, say only 20% of the page width on screeen (using the mouse) before Copying it, and then magnify back up in Textures, the fonts for axis labels get magnified also, which is what I usually want. That is, the initial screen display in mma is then shrunk and looks bad, but the final printed TeX output is better. Conversely, enlarging the initial screen display up to full page width before Copying, which makes it look better in mma, does the reverse as regards the final TeX output. Shrinking before Copying in mma also means, however, that the _on-screen_ preview in Textures looks lousy, which I suppose is because the on-screen preview in Textures uses the PICT part of the EPSF file, and it's been captured at smaller scale. I can live with this. I do have two questions from this: 1) How to write a graphic directly to a file as an EPSF file, without going through the Copy/ConvertClipboard step? (I suspect I could RTFM on this, but maybe someone can say immediately). 2) More significant: Is there a variable that's accessible in mma by which I can find out the width and height of the resulting EPSF graphic? (which I need for later scaling in the TeX processing). I suppose a third question is: Is there a better or easier way using the same tools, i.e. Textures for final printing? ==== [MESSAGE SEPARATOR] ====