Printing from the Viewer

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7.5 Printing from the Viewer

You can use the Data:Print menu or the Print button to bring up the Viewer Print Manager. From this panel, you can print a hardcopy of what is in the Display Panel, or save it in a variety of formats.

Figure 7.23: Setting up to print to a file. The background color has been set to white, the line width to 2, and the print resolution to 600 dpi (for an postscript plot). To make the plot, use the Save button on the Viewer Print Manager panel (positioned in the figure in the upper right) and select a format with the drop-down, or use the Print button to send directly to a printer.

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Figure 7.23 shows an example of printing to a file. The key to making acceptable hardcopies (particularly for printing or inclusion in documents) is to set the background color and line widths to appropriate values so the plot and labels show up in the limited resolution of the hardcopy.

Use the Viewer Canvas Manager (§ 7.3.6) to change the Background Color from its default of black to white if you are making plots for printing or inclusion in a document. You might also want to change the colormap accordingly.

Adjust the Line Width of the Axis Label Properties options in the Data Display Options panel so that the labels will be visible when printed. Increasing from the default of 1.4 to a value around 2 seems to work well.

You can choose an output file name in the panel. Be sure to make it a new name, otherwise it will not overwrite a previous file (and will not say anything about it).

If you will be printing to a postscript printer or to a PS or EPS file, dial up the [PS] Resolution (dpi) to its maximum of 600. This will increase the size of the PS file somewhat, but will make a much better plot. Use gzip to compress the PS file if necessary. Be sure to choose the desired Output Media and Orientation for PS also.

BETA ALERT: The postscript printing capabilities of the casaviewer are currently limited due to some issues with the way we use Qt and do axis labels. Significant improvements have been made in Patch 3. This will be further upgraded in the future, but for now you will need to follow the suggestions above to get a useable plot. Note that ghostview may show a poorer version of the PS than you will get when you print.

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