Comments on: Making Fonts Better in IDL Postscript Output

By: Kelle

Kelle — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:27:06 +0000

check out a post by Saurav on adding symbols to IDL figures with LaTeX and PSFrag:
http://www.astrobetter.com/idl-psfrag/

By: Tigran

Tigran — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:13:42 +0000

Sorry to barge on you with my solution to the problem but some Mac people may find this useful. Previously I used to straggle with fonts and all the plotting particulars in IDL but then I’ve decided to go simpler: I use IDL to produce the plot or the image then I get this result into keynote and do all the annotations and graphics. Here I can use all the possible fonts available in the system. Next I export it as a PDF and it’s done. I could also print it to PDF using Adobe distiller if the file size is the issue. Of course I can crop and do some final tuning in the end with just Preview. I know this is somehow cheating but it’s simple and quick.

By: Jaesub

Jaesub — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 07:10:47 +0000

hmm, I wonder this was mentioned (too lazy to read all the text and comments, if so, forgive me), but there is a simple solution to make
the idl default font very readable in ps plots. It’s

!p.charthick=3

which is similar to

!x.thick=3
!y.thick=3
!z.thick=3

for drawing lines, etc.
A quick solution for a lazy person.

By: Jer

Jer — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:36:59 +0000

I’ve gotten the sun symbol in TT fonts using the same method as David Ciardi, but only on my Mac. On my work desktop, I don’t have write access to the relevant directory. But… I can’t get kcorrect to work on my Mac, only on the Linux desktop. So I can either do the calculation but not plot it nicely, or plot it nicely but not have anything to plot!

Anyone know a way to have user-space TT fonts in IDL? (or get kcorrect to compile on Leopard?)

By: Kelle

Kelle — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:51:51 +0000

@WayneS. I'm not a postscript expert, but the basic reason we use postscript fonts is because the ideal end result for a figure is to be included in a journal article as an EPS file. The best way to ensure an EPS figure looks the way you want it to is to use PS fonts. If you don't use PS fonts, then you have to convert to outline or otherwise ensure the font is included in the EPS. This issue is touched on in the Graphics Guidelines for AAS Journals. For talks, it really doesn't matter if you use TT or PS as long as the characters are big and thick. But since you want to use PS for the paper, might as well use it all the time.

By: WayneS

WayneS — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:12:43 +0000

Hi everyone, Why are you using the device hardware font rather than rendering a truetype font? Is the device font better for printing since the fonts are already in the printer? What about displaying these figures in talks as PDFs, does it really matter?

By: David Ciardi

David Ciardi — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:15:26 +0000

Kelle et al: (sorry about the long-ish post) I have struggled with this for quite a while and my solution partial solution was to use true type fonts (for now or thick hersey font). I tried copying the Apple Symbols.ttf into $IDL_DIR/resource/fonts/tt and adding an appropriate line to ttfont.map. However, the Apple ttf file appears to be in a form not readable by IDL. I get the following error when invoking the font (IDL> ; % PLOT: Unsupported glyph table format for TrueType fonts). However, I copied the Arial Unicode MS ttf from Windows and installed in IDL tt fonts directory and it worked perfectly. So the Apple tt font files seem to be in a format IDL can’t read, but Windows font files are ok (not a surprise since IDL can use the Windows font directory). This doesn’t solve the problem of having a postscript font with a sunsymbol … (Mac OS 10.5.8, IDL 7.0.4)

By: David Fanning

David Fanning — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:00:51 +0000

Yikes! Yeah, I don’t think all that nonsense is necessary.

I’ll see if I can borrow my son’s Mac before he leaves for college next week and figure out an easier method for you.

By: kelle

kelle — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:26:58 +0000

Here’s the page I was following:
Adding Your Own PostScript Fonts

Where I ran into a wall was converting the AppleSymbols.ttf file found on my system into a .pfb and or .afm file. I considered buying Astrology Pi One or Lucida Math Extension from Adobe ($26) but didn’t make it that far. I think this is probably the way to go…

By: David Fanning

David Fanning — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:10:33 +0000

Well, you are sending a lot of traffic to my site. I’m trying to figure out why.

When you say you were “unsuccessful”, did you get *anything*? Are you certain you had selected True-Type fonts (i.e., font=1)? Even with computers, there is usually a reason why things to wrong.