Following my recent question regarding how best to get XWINPLOT files into
Word documents, I enclose copies of the responses below. There seems to be
no overall favoured approach, with people adopting a variety of strategies
covering EPS, HPGL, PCX and TIFF....
Thanks to all who replied...
Tim.
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The best way is to use EPS/EPSI files. These files are resolution
independent because they contain vector graphics. For Word (at least for
current versions) appropriate filtes should be available. You can also try
to read these files in Corel Draw 6, copy the results to the Windows
clipboard and then import the clipboard contents to Word.
Concerning TIFF files you can try to enhance resolution by changing a line
in the file /u/prog/app-defaults/UtilPrinterSetup. Instead of
TIFF,tiff24nc,-,1
try
TIFF,tiff24nc,-r300,1
This should result in a TIFF file with a resolution of 300 DPI. Note,
however, that to my experience Word tends to crash when importing large
pixel-based graphics. Instead of the TIFF format you can also choose the PCX
format.
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Use "Plotting to disk" in HP-GL format. Import that into Word (you may
need to get a convertor , see M$oft.com Web site).
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X-winnmr --> ps-A format is read by Corel-draw (I think it's the
photo-paint module).
Cut n' paste (metafile) into Word, takes less space, high resolution.
Corel has, by far the most versatile graphics filters, so is worth
investing in, if necessary.
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I have found that the best way to remove plots from the Indy into a
format that can be displayed on a PC, is to write the plots as
postscript files, ftp them to my PC, where they are picked up by Acrobat
Distiller (part of Acrobat Exchange), and converted into pdf format,
whereupon they can be viewed by other acrobat products (including the
freeware reader). However this does not answer the question of how to
get them into Word. On my home PC, I have bought a program from
Micrografx called windows draw ($50 from Comp. USA), which will import
postscript files. Whilst I haven't yet tried importing these into word
as a graphic, annotating the spectra and printing from draw work just
fine. If I get time this weekend, I'll try and see how an import into
word goes.
I know that Adobe Illustrator will open pdf files, but only on a Mac, so
I haven't tried that yet. Canvas (deneba) will also open pdf files, but
it does not work well enough in my experience.. Does anyone know of any
other products which will open ps or pdf files, and thus allow cut and
paste into word? (I don't like using hpgl format by the way)
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This has been discussed last year, see URL
http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/College/Facilities/nmr/bum/96/archive/0320.html
for a useful description of how to convert PS to HP-GL, and the URL
http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/College/Facilities/nmr/bum/96/archive/0322.html
for the location of the pstohpgl.ps, and how to write a simple script.
This works well for us using MS Word6 for editing/further
annotations/scaling/whatever.
(You may also want to check the archives for additional discussions of this
topic.)
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to give everbody a first hand look at what is possible directly from
XWINPLOT, I have posted a PCX file which I have generated directly
from the program on our ftp server.
ftp://ftp.bruker.com/pub/nmr/download/bruker/example.pcx
I have successfully imported this file into MS-WORD 6. All parameters are
readable, but not every splitting in the spectrum is. After all this is a
300 dpi image and if the lines of a multiplet are not at least 3/300 of an
inch
or about .25 mm apart one will not see them resolved.
The example file is 10 x 7.5 inches in size using 8bit color this results in
a file
of over 300 kBytes. That's why I didn't attach it here.
We would actually appreciate if we could get some feedback into which types
of wordprocessing, desktop publishing and drawing software this file could be
succesfully or unsuccessfully imported.
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A few more bits of info about plot files. Over the past few days I've
been tinkering with methods to reduce the size of the file to a
reasonable size so that I can routinely incorporate spectra into word
processing reports. In my experience, if you put too many 300K plot
files into a document, users running on PCs with low amounts of memory
often run into problems trying to play with the docs.
The formula I have arrived at is to tinker with the ghostscript defaults
in Xwinplot to get a smaller file. In
/u/prog/app-defaults/UtilPrinterSetup, line 43 reads:
TIFF,tiff24nc,-,1,
I changed that to:
TIFF,tiffg4,-r200x200,1,
and further down in this file, under "*paperTable:\", I added:
A6,a6,10.477,14.851,1.0,1.0,1.5,1.5,\
to the table.
This changes the TIFF output in Xwinplot to a 1-bit color depth, which
is no problem for the black & white output I want. In Xwinplot, I plot
to a file in TIFF format on a6 paper size (added above). Then, the
output can be handled by shareware such as xv (UNIX) or GraphicConverter
(Mac) to rotate the image by 90 deg. and save it as a standard TIFF.
This formula results in 200 DPI files that consumes about 50 % of a
letter-size page and gives data file sizes of ~ 120K. If you really
need 600 DPI resolution, just change the "TIFF" line above (at the cost
of bigger data file sizes). With typical Xwinplot templates, 200 DPI
permits you to decipher the parameter text.
I have experienced poor resolution and/or compatibilty problems with
trying to resize and manipulate PCX and TIFF images after XWinPlot
(which is really using ghostscript 'behind the curtain'). Transverter
Pro for Mac does a nice, but expensive (~US$400), job of converting PS
to TIFF directly. In our environment (50% Mac, 50% PC, WordPerfect,
some Word, Notes, Groupwise), uncompressed TIFFs seem to have the
highest graphic success rate across platforms, apps, and printers.
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Try printing to a PCX file, this should import into most
programs, or certainly can be converted. (note that one
version of XWINPLOT had a configuration problem for which a fix
was posted last autumn in the Bruker mail, you should find it
in the mail archives)
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Dr. Tim Claridge
NMR Facility Manager
The Dyson Perrins Laboratory
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3QY, UK.
Tel: (01865) 275658 Email: tim.claridge@dpl.ox.ac.uk
Fax: (01865) 275674