output

[David Gibson]

In article "output" in <!survex>, on Thu, 13 Dec 2001
Wookey <wookey@aleph1.co.uk> writes

>On Wed 12 Dec, graham.mullan wrote:
>> Does anyone know of a way of directly outputting a Survex plot as a bitmap
>> (or anything else, preferably a tiff) so that it can be modified on-screen
>> for publication, rather than having to use the low-tech option of print and
>> scan?
>
>You can print an hpgl output to a file instead of a printer and then drop it
>into something like coreldraw to get (a vector) image. You can probably do
>the same with postscript output.
>
>A modern drawing package can presumably turn this into a bitmap image of some
>sort for you?

Coreldraw will allow you to export the previously imported HPGL file as
a bitmap (e.g. TIFF etc). 

But my version (5) limits you to 4800x4800 pixels which is not good
enough for high-quality reproduction, because for text and line drawings
(as opposed to photos), you really need >1200dpi to get professional
magazine-quality reproduction.  Ive come unstuck a number of times in
this area and the professional advice is to *avoid* bit-map graphics -
keep everything in vector form as far as you can.

This is a digression, but to illustrate the point...
Magazine publishers (or, at least, the ones that know what they are
doing) go spare if you send them a photo at, say 300dpi, with text
superimposed on it. They require the text separately, at a much higher
resolution).

And, slightly more to the point, I have heard that the editor of Descent
gets a bit weary of people sending him bit-mapped cave surveys that are
of a totally inadequate resolution!
-- 
David Gibson