In article <t0dk26.hjv.ln at wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de>, Cornelius Krasel <krasel at wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de> writes:
>Basically there are three possibilities:
>>a) Use a terminal program with Tektronix emulation. NCSA Telnet, Versaterm
> are two of them (I've been told that the successor of NCSA Telnet,
> BetterTelnet, also has Tek graphics). Quality of the graphics is not
> very good.
>>b) If you have a reasonably powerful Mac, get an X-Windows Server. I
> know of two, MacX and eXceed. My experience with them has been
> rather limited, and I was not impressed (comparing eXceed on a
> PowerMac 6100/60 to Linux on a 486DX2/66).
>>c) Fiddle with the postscript output. There is a program which can
> translate postscript to illustrator format, thereby allowing
> subsequent manipulation. However, the illustrator files are
> often *very* complex and you will need a powerful machine to
> work in a reasonable speed.
Have a look at:
http://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu/HELP/@SHRDISK:[SHARED.MISC]GCG_GRAPHICS/GRAPHICS
see especially under "useful_tricks".
Anyway, the problem with the first 2 methods advanced above is that TEXT
comes through as a zillion line segments, which makes the resulting
pictures nearly impossible to manipulate, and the problem with the third is
that hardly anybody has Illustrator. If you are still running GCG 8.x you
can use a driver I wrote to put graphic output directly into CGM files,
which most Mac and Windows graphics programs can handle. Result, text
stays text (use /font=0 !!!), dotted lines become dotted line
objects, and file sizes decrease by an order of magnitude. (Unfortunately,
arcs are still multiple line segments as that is hardwired into the GCG
graphics above the driver level.) Pick it up as either:
ftp://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu/software/GCGCGM.TAR
or
ftp://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu/software/GCGCGM.ZIP
If you have GCG 9.x you're on your own - we never upgraded to that level.
I doubt that you will be able to install this driver at 9.x as GCG crippled
the product at that point (which is why we dropped our support contract),
maybe if you have licensed all of the "extras" that used to be standard you
will be able to do it. (Nobody has reported to me that they have done so.)
There is one other graphics option. The HPGL driver at 8.x kept text as
text too, so after transferring HPGL files to your Mac, you can use HP2PICT
Hypercard stack to get to PICT.
For Windows, there is a HP2CGM, but all I know about it is that it is
a commercial product.
I never found GCG's GCGFigure program to be of any use at all. While it
will save a graphic as a PICT file, it suffers from the zillion line
segment ills, and is basically no improvement at all over, for instance,
save graphics in Versaterm.
Regards,
David Mathog
mathog at seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech
