The Graphics Cookbook

This cookbook is a collection of introductory material covering a wide range of topics dealing with data display, format conversion and presentation. Along with this material are pointers to more advanced documents dealing with the various packages, and hints and tips about how to deal with commonly occurring graphics problems.

1 Introduction
2 Call for contributions
3 Subroutine Libraries
3.1 The PGPLOT library
  3.1.1 Encapsulated Postscript and PGPLOT
  3.1.2 PGPLOT Environment Variables
  3.1.3 PGPLOT Postscript Environment Variables
  3.1.4 Special characters inside PGPLOT text strings
3.2 The BUTTON library
3.3 The pgperl package
  3.3.1 Argument mapping – simple numbers and arrays
  3.3.2 Argument mapping – images and 2D arrays
  3.3.3 Argument mapping – function names
  3.3.4 Argument mapping – general handling of binary data
3.4 Python PGPLOT
3.5 GLISH PGPLOT
3.6 ptcl Tk/Tcl and PGPLOT
3.7 Starlink/Native PGPLOT
3.8 Graphical Kernel System (GKS)
  3.8.1 Enquiring about the display
  3.8.2 Compiling and Linking GKS programs
3.9 Simple Graphics System (SGS)
3.10 PLplot Library
  3.10.1 PLplot and 3D Surface Plots
3.11 The libjpeg Library
3.12 The giflib Library
3.13 The libungif Library
3.14 The angif Library
3.15 The PNG Format
3.16 The MNG Format
3.17 The Python Imaging Library
3.18 The gd Library
  3.18.1 gd from other languages
4 Plotting Packages
4.1 QDP
  4.1.1 QDP Basic Stuff
  4.1.2 Plot devices and PostScript output
  4.1.3 Error Bars
  4.1.4 That “Date and Time” Thing
  4.1.5 Fitting using QDP
  4.1.6 QDP Files
  4.1.7 COD and QDP models
4.2 PONGO
4.3 SM
4.4 GNUplot
  4.4.1 Co-ordinate systems
  4.4.2 Plotting 3D data
5 Image Display
5.1 KAPPA
5.2 SAOimage
  5.2.1 Printing in SAOimage
5.3 GAIA
6 Visualisation
7 Other Applications
7.1 ImageMagick
  7.1.1 display
  7.1.2 import
  7.1.3 animate
  7.1.4 montage
  7.1.5 convert
  7.1.6 mogrify
  7.1.7 identify
  7.1.8 combine
  7.1.9 XTP
  7.1.10 XMagick
  7.1.11 PythonMagick
7.2 XV
  7.2.1 Screen Capture
  7.2.2 Problems with small images
  7.2.3 Getting XV, patches and enhancements
  7.2.4 Compiling XV on RedHat 6.0
  7.2.5 XV is not under the GPL
7.3 XPaint
7.4 Xfig
  7.4.1 pstoedit
7.5 Sketch
7.6 GIMP
  7.6.1 Plug-ins, Script-Fu, GIMP-Perl and Gimp::Fu
  7.6.2 GIMP-Python
  7.6.3 GIMP Plug-In Registry
  7.6.4 The GIMP and layers
  7.6.5 Mapping images to solid objects
7.7 Electric Eyes
7.8 WhirlGIF
8 CAD Applications
  8.0.1 QCad
  8.0.2 XCircuit
9 Format Conversion
9.1 CONVERT
  9.1.1 NDF2GIF
9.2 PBMplus
  9.2.1 PBM, PGM, PPM or PNM images?
9.3 Image Resizing
10 Postscript and PDF
10.1 Ghostscript
10.2 GV and Ghostview
10.3 Acrobat
10.4 psmerge
10.5 epsutil
10.6 prescript and pstotext
10.7 Postscript to PDF
10.8 PS Utils
10.9 Generating Postscript Output
11 X Window Displays
11.1 Pseudocolor
11.2 Grey Scale
11.3 Static Grey
11.4 Directcolor
11.5 Truecolor
11.6 What does this mean for you?
11.7 Pseudo Colour applications on True Colour desktops
12 Virtual Computing
12.1 Virtual Network Computing (VNC)
  12.1.1 Pseudo colour displays
  12.1.2 Computing by remote control
12.2 VMWare
12.3 plex86 (previously FreeMWare)
12.4 The VMWare and plex86 Patent Position
13 Hardware
13.1 Scanners
13.2 Digital Cameras
14 The Web
14.1 Transparent GIFs
14.2 Animated GIFs
14.3 Beveled Images
14.4 “Web Safe” Colour Maps
14.5 Browser support of PNG images
15 The GIF Legal Position
16 From the Quick Archives
16.1 FITS to MPEG
17 Package Availability

Revision history

Acknowledgments

In compiling this document I have leant heavily on already available material, usually the packages manual or other documentation, in all cases links to the original sources have been included. Some of the material on VNC was based on a draft SUN written by Mark Taylor. The image of Tux the penguin used throughout this cookbook was created by Larry Ewing (lewing@isc.tamu.edu) using The GIMP.

Abstract

Contents

Revision history

Acknowledgments