Thanks Mary Haley for your reply to:
>man ctrans (in Sun Ultra 60, Solaris 7 version of Unix) says ...
>
>-d device Device name. ctrans will use the Graphcap (if it exists)
> or the appropriate graphics library indicated by device; If device
> is preceded by a UNIX directory path then ctrans will look in that
> directory for the specified graphcap. Otherwise ctrans searches
> the directory $NCARG_ROOT/lib/ncarg/graphcaps for the graphcap.
>
> How about trying this direct from gmeta to a .png (Portable
>Network Graphics) plot format image file? Anyone know of such a
>graphcap file which can let ctrans do this?. (Or how about .gif
>(Graphics Image File), .jpg (JPEG Image File), .bmp (Windows
>bitmap image file), or .pcx (ZSoft IBM PC Paintbrush file)?)
I actually do about as you suggest. It seemed that I got good .gif
versions by creating a .hdf (Hierarchical Data File) by ctrans which I
then turn into .gif using Image Tools (free) as you say from San Diego
Supercomputer Center. This appeared better than using a .ras (Sun
Rasterfile) as the intermediate form. However if done to what I would
lay over a color coded terrain which came from a .jpg file, some colors
got distorted in the final step of converting to .gif after compositing,
but this could be avoided by staying as .jpg through compositing over the
terrain, then using djpeg -gif file.jpg > file.gif (Wallace, Gregory K.
"The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard", Communications of the ACM,
April 1991 (vol. 34, no. 4), pp. 30-44. <---grabbed from the bottom of
man djpeg). djpeg gave a bigger .gif file than Image Tools, but
preserved the original colors. Staying as .jpg was also smaller than
what djpeg produced. Small size can be important for plots others will
display from WWWeb. Smaller=faster, bigger=slower. .png from simple
line graphs (not from NCAR Graphics) can be much smaller (and crisper)
than .gif or .jpg. That's what led me to look at .png.
I will look at "The applications rasttopnm and ppmtogif [which you
mention] are part of the netpbm package which is public domain software
available at the URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/netpbm/". But
what I was curious about was whether there were suitable graphcap files
which would be acceptable to ctrans to allow going direct in one step,
hence perhaps obtaining an output image file which better preserved what
gmeta looked like. SCO Xenix version of Unix which I put on my now 10yr
old home PC mentioned termcap and graphcap files, so I thought perhaps
graphcap files which man ctrans referred to above were somewhat standard
under Unix, and hence might exist somewhere for .png, .gif, .jpg, .bmp,
.pcx etc. image formats which ctrans would then be able to use, as man
ctrans above suggests.
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