On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Jonathan Slavin
<jsla...@cfa.harvard.edu>wrote:
> This is starting to get off topic from matplotlib, but it is relevant to
> creating good EPS figures...
>
> When using ImageMagick to transform from to an EPS, your results will be
> much improved by using the parameter "-density 288". This increases the
> resolution (and thus results in a much bigger file). I find this is
> adequate for producing publication quality plots.
>
This is getting off-topic, but this is also something that I feel quite
strongly about. There is no point in submitting an EPS file that comes from
ImageMagick for publication. Because of the rasterization, you might as
well send them a PNG file.
There are a few reasons why publishers request vector-based graphics
formats. First, they can change the font properties and the text of the
figure as needed. If the image has been rasterized, they then have to edit
out the rasterized text and put in their own text. Second, there are
various anti-aliasing techniques that can be utilized for text and lines as
one scales the image for different publishing mediums. If you take your
high resolution rasterized eps file and try viewing the text when the figure
is scaled to a small size, and then try the same for an unrasterized eps
file, so long as your viewer is decent, the unrasterized image will remain
readable at smaller sizes than the high-resolution rasterized version.
Don't rasterize your vector images... your publications will thank you for
that!
/rant
On a related note, you *should* rasterize your pcolor() and imshow() using
"rasterize=True" in those function calls. This will allow the image to be
rasterized to its native resolution, while still letting everything else in
the figure remain vector-based. This results in beautiful plots with sane
file sizes.
Ben Root
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