idl

Introducing Coyote Graphics: The New Old Graphics System for IDL

by Guest March 22, 2011

This is a guest post by David “Coyote” Fanning. The Coyote is familiar to many of us since his web page, Coyote’s Guide to IDL Programming, is the most informative web page on IDL. He has been working with IDL software for nearly 25 years. He developed the first IDL training course and became the [...]

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Add Symbols and Equations to IDL Figures with LaTeX and PSfrag

by saurav January 4, 2011

While IDL does support math equations and symbols—often made easier by routines like sunsymbol.pro and textoidl.pro—the results are not aesthetically pleasing. One particular instance that has annoyed many of us astronomers has been the sunsymbol (⦿). The available solutions are not ideal: the dot inside the circle is off-center in sunsymbol.pro, the vertical alignment is [...]

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Read IDL ‘save’ files into Python

by Tom November 24, 2009

One of the most popular posts on this blog is Kelle’s reposting of Greenfield and Jedrzejewski’s IDL vs Python earlier this year. I am an avid Python user and have never installed IDL on my computer. Recently, I developed IDLSave, a package to read IDL ‘save’ files into Python, after being sent a few such [...]

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IDL vs. Python

by Kelle May 4, 2009

Here is a really nice listing of the pros and cons of IDL and Python for astronomers. It’s an Appendix of the Python tutorial Using Python for Interactive Data Analysis by Greenfield and Jedrzejewski at STScI. Data and scripts for the examples and exercises in the tutorial are available at scipy.org. Update 28 Jan 2010: [...]

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Making Fonts Better in IDL Postscript Output

by Kelle April 23, 2009

We’ve all seen it before, illegible labels on a figure in a paper or talk. I don’t know how to remedy this problem in SuperMongo or other popular plotting programs, but I do in IDL. I’ve addressed the topic of postscript output on my IDL figures page but in this post I’m just going to [...]

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