On 2009-09-17 14:40+0200 hans.rijn...@shell.com wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I got some problems when I had a colour table with 150 colours in cmap0 and 
> then wanted to create a "gif" file from that. I got an error like "Too many 
> colours in cmap0".
>
> Looking through the code it turned out to be cuased by the "gd.c" driver. 
> This one takes the maximum number of colours "NCOLOURS" from "gdMacColors" 
> (which is defined as 256 in the header file gd.h). But at a certain moment 
> the number of colours as defined for the cmap0 colour table is compared with 
> "NCOLOURS/2" (see line815 in gd.c).
>
> So, as I have 150 colours in my map, I now get this error as it exceeds 128 
> and my "gif" file is not what I wanted.
>
> Is there a special reason why only half of the colours is allowed here ?
>
> (I removed that limitation by just testing at NCOLOURS and now my picture 
> looks as expected)

Hi Hans:

The png, jpeg, and gif devices are all implemented via the gd device driver
which is unmaintained, deprecated, and not removed at the moment simply
because some legacy Linux "enterprise" distros don't have access to good
versions of the stack of cairo-related libraries and/or the Qt libraries.
The gd device driver has major issues with unicode font handling, rendering
of complex-text-layout (CTL) languages, and text offsets which are all
solved with the cairo devices and the qt devices.  There are much better
alternatives for JPEG format (use jpgqt) and PNG format (use pngqt or
pngcairo).  The GIF format has some technical limitations (such as lack of a
large colour space) so you may find you far prefer the PNG format (either
pngqt or pngcairo) instead. However, if for some legacy reason you really
need GIF, then I think the best way to implement that with PLplot is to
generate PNG format with PLplot and then use the ImageMagick convert
programme to generate the corresponding GIF.

I hope this overview helps you and others here make a good choice of PLplot
bitmapped device drivers.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

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