> images in general, for that matter). I'd
> like to find something in addition to Rasmol
> for print -- which is wonderful, but I need
> to be able to enlarge, change background, etc.
Welcome to the wonderful world of image conversion!
As Kipling might have said:
'There are nine and sixty ways of constructing images
And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right!'
There is a fundamental law of the universe which says that whenever you
get a new program it will use an image format that you have never heard
of before but the whole world uses as a standard.
There are image conversion programs which will convert one format
to another. UNIX examples are imconv, netpbm and ImageMagick. If you are
going to do anything with images, you'll need to make friends with them.
You will find that everything goes great - you can actually convert
between formats. Everything is fine until you come to publish a paper.
Then the next law of the universe comes in:
All publishers use different packages for combined text and
graphics. You may think you have heard of them and send off a file in
the 'correct' format.
Law:
Publishers always use *versions* of programs that exist only in the
publishing world and are incompatible with anything in the real world.
Corollary:
A colour picture sent to a publisher will be rendered in black
and white. Sometimes the white is mapped onto black.
Experimental work:
For your next publication, try mailing your publisher a
postscript file of the whole manuscript. (Hint: pick one that actually
has an e-mail address).
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When I produce diagrams for this course and elsewhere, I:
draw them in showcase (SGI) to preserve their structure. (Bitmaps,
such as gif, tiff, biff, don't scale very well,
especially text.)
write them out as EPS files
convert the files to gifs (needs pstoppm and netpbm)
edit the colourmaps in the gifs using xv (because otherwise white comes
out as magenta)
use xpaint to add captions
This, of course, only works on UNIX. But at least the gifs will port
and display elsewhere (pace Unisys).
So, gentle readers, IMO
there is no simple solution!
So, being practical, if you want a bitmap graphics which you aren't going
to print, I suggest you use xv or similar to grab it from the screen. If
you want to print it, you'll need to find what file types your printer
accepts and pind a package which is capable of wewriting those. Then
you have to find a file type that you can import from the screen and
which can be converted without much loss of colour, scale, resolution, etc.
Oh, and just remember. Printing a colour image to a b/w printer
can have interesting effects. I'll let you find out what *yours* does.
It would be extremely useful for the course if someone could list
the image conversion programs for each platform and how they can be used
most effectively.
BTW.
Although there *are* other file types in MIME, if you are
producting material FOR THE COURSE, please stick to GIF. many people
will not have postscript viewers.
P.
Peter Murray-Rust (pmr1716@ggr.co.uk) Glaxo Research & Development, Greenford,UK
mbglx@seqnet.dl.ac.uk, http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/pmr.html (Thanks to AlanBleasby)
>