These programs use a "PANEL" package, which is included within
the program code. Aside from the files listed, no extra downloads are
needed. Please let me know if you have problems. I am still updating
these programs as needed.
All of the plotting programs should behave correctly if you give
either the standard POSITION keyword or no positioning information at
all. They also accept an arcane "PANEL/SUBPANEL" notation which you
should not worry about unless you want to. PLOTCUBE is a whimsical
demonstration of PANELs -- an example of how to create a tight matrix
You can download the entire plotting archive here:
PLOTIMAGE - Display an image using a PLOT-like interface
Screen shot - the lower panel is created by
PLOTIMAGE in particular makes it very easy to plot images or slices
of images with proper coordinate axes. Once this is done, then
overlays of other graphics like contours is very easy, since the
coordinate system is already established. Display of images is
essentially achieved in the same way that other data is plotted with
PLOT. You can specify an XRANGE and YRANGE to include or exclude any
part of the image, etc. OPLOTIMAGE will overlay an image on an
existing plot, not necessarily created by PLOTIMAGE.
This new version (19 Apr 2000) has significant improvements.
Display of true-color 8 and 24 bit images should work in both 8 and 24
graphics modes. By default the screen image is not smoothed;
activate smoothing with the /INTERP keyword. Printed images can be
automatically smoothed to achieve a minimum desired pixel resolution
via the MIN_DPI keyword. Automatic intensity scaling of 8 bit images
can be done via the RANGE keyword and its attendant color table
selection keywords. The /PRESERVE_ASPECT keyword will maintain the
aspect ratio of the image, keeping pixels square.
PXPERFECT - Get 'pixel perfect' Postscript output which matches the on-screen version
PXPERFECT is designed to achieve nearly "pixel perfect" matching
of plot layout when rendering a plot on the IDL Postscript device.
The dimensions and character sizes of the current display device
are used to construct a group of settings which can be passed to
the Postscript device driver using the DEVICE procedure.
The key capability of PXPERFECT is to determine the size of fonts
to match the on-screen size. Once this size is determined, IDL
will adjust other Postscript output dimensions such as plot
margins, font sizes, symbol sizes, etc, to match exactly the
The current direct graphics device must be a screen display
device, such as 'X' or 'WIN'. The user wouuld first call
PXPERFECT() to determine what the appropriate settings for the
Postscript device would be. At a later time, the user may switch
to the Postscript device to render the plot for output.
This is the approximate order of calling:
;; Prerequisite: current graphics device is display device
SET_PLOT, 'X' ;; or 'WIN'
TF = 1.0 ;; Thickness factor (see "Dealing with line thickness" below)
;; User adjusts the plot layout to taste
PLOT, ... data ..., thick=1.0*TF
;; Capture layout settings and then initialize Postscript
PS_EXTRA = PXPERFECT(THICK_FACTOR=TF)
SET_PLOT, 'PS' ;; NOTE: PXPERFECT() called *before* SET_PLOT
;; User calls same plot command(s) with no changes to layout
PLOT, ... data ..., thick=1.0*TF
;; Close output plot file
PXPERFECT also has settings to re-size the page and adjust Postscript
PLOTCOLORFILL - Display colorful bar charts
Screen shot - a
color-coded X-ray light curve
PLOTCOLORFILL plots nice and optionally colorful bar charts. The
example code in the documentation shows how to make stacked bar
PLOTCUBE - Plot three dimensional data as a cube
PLOTCUBE is a whimsical demonstration of PANELs -- an example of
how to create a tight matrix of plots which can be printed and folded
to make a three dimensional cube.
PLOTBIN - Plot fixed or variable-width histogram
PLOTBIN plots histograms. The width of the histogram bins can be
variable by using the WIDTH keyword.