[ncarg-talk] graphcaps for raster output

Mary Haley haley at ucar.edu
Mon Jun 12 09:51:56 MDT 2017


Hi Petra,

When following up with a question, it's good to CC ncarg-talk so people can
benefit from any new input. Sometimes we take the question offline if
there's a lot of email going back and forth on a topic.

You can output PS and PDF directly from an NCAR Graphics program, if you
have a version that's at least 6.2 or later.

For example, if you type this:

ncargex agex01

and then look at the "agex01.f" Fortran code, you will see these lines:

C     PARAMETER (IERRF=6, LUNIT=2, IWTYPE=1,  IWKID=1)   ! NCGM


C     PARAMETER (IERRF=6, LUNIT=2, IWTYPE=8,  IWKID=1)   ! X Windows


C     PARAMETER (IERRF=6, LUNIT=2, IWTYPE=11, IWKID=1)   ! PDF


C     PARAMETER (IERRF=6, LUNIT=2, IWTYPE=20, IWKID=1)   ! PostScript


You can see if you use a IWTYPE of 11, this gives you PDF.

Have you considered using NCL instead of NCAR Graphics?  NCL is a scripting
language that's based on top of NCAR Graphics, but it gives you file I/O
and computational routines in addition to graphics.  I think you would find
NCL much easier to use than NCAR Graphics, and you still can still create
the same images.

You can also do animations. See our examples page for NCL, which includes a
page on animations:

http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Applications/animate.shtml


--Mary



On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 2:24 AM, Petra Seibert <petra.seibert at boku.ac.at>
wrote:

> Dear Mary!
>
> I do have to ask, however, why you are still using the NCGM format? This
>> format is an internal one that is no longer being maintained.  We
>> recommend
>> that you send your output to a PS, PDF, or PNG image. The NCGM format does
>>
>
> I was not aware that it is possible to produce a PDF directly with
> NCARG-GKS. I usually produce either PS or NCGM. For larger output with many
> frames, NCGM seems to be more useful as it has a smaller file size and thus
> is easier to handle. Also, one can produce raster format images directly.
> However, I found that they are of lower quality than raster images produced
> via an intermediate PS (which is kind of a pity).
> And there is the very flexible idt viewer with zoom, movie etc
> capabilities.
>
> Where I ran into problems recently was to produce a movie (mp4), it's
> not trivial to have a good quality, small file size, and fast processing
> together. Also on CentOS direct conversion of ps to mp4 failed due to some
> incompatibility between imagemagick and ffmpeg, but that's obviously not
> your topic.
>
> not support some of the new features that we added several years ago, like
>> the ability to use transparent and named colors (without first having to
>> add
>> the named color to the workstation colormap).
>>
>
> I don't need named colours or transparency.
>
> Best regards
> Petra
>
>
>
>> --Mary
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 5:39 AM, <petra at imp1.boku.ac.at> wrote:
>>       Dear Mary,
>>
>>       man graphcap lists a number of output devices which are raster
>>       graphics
>>       file formats. However, the actual content of the graphcaps dir
>>       (see below)
>>       does not contain them. It seems that only printer and terminal
>>       formats and
>>       postscript is available. Of course, I could use postscript and
>>       then
>>       convert this to a raster format, but obviously this is
>>       cumbersome and in
>>       case of processing a large number of plots also time-consuming.
>>       I would
>>       therefore appreciate your feedback.
>>
>>       Best regards
>>       Petra
>>
>>
>>       ls /opt/ncl621/lib/ncarg/graphcaps/
>>       adm5    ditroff  hp7510a     hpgl2pe       pc.mono
>>       ps.mono  t4010
>>       t4107.seg  tekalike     vt220  vt340w
>>       aed.a   hp150    hpgl        hpgl2pe.dual  ps.color
>>        qms800   t4025
>>       t4115      versaterm    vt240
>>       aed.b   hp2648a  hpgl2       imagen        ps.land.color  r6211
>>         t4105
>>       t4115.seg  vt100        vt330
>>       balsml  hp7475a  hpgl2.dual  imagen.port   ps.land.mono   s100
>>          t4107
>>       tal1590    vt125        vt340
>>
>>       _______________________________________________
>>       ncarg-talk mailing list
>>       ncarg-talk at ucar.edu
>>       http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncarg-talk
>>
>>
>>
>>
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